Discovering Knowledge in Data Using Formal Concept Analysis

Abstract

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has been successfully applied to data in a number of problem domains. However, its use has tended to be on an ad hoc, bespoke basis, relying on FCA experts working closely with domain experts and requiring the production of specialised FCA software for the data analysis. The availability of generalised tools and techniques, that might allow FCA to be applied to data more widely, is limited. Two important issues provide barriers: raw data is not normally in a form suitable for FCA and requires undergoing a process of transformation to make it suitable, and even when converted into a suitable form for FCA, real data sets tend to produce a large number of results that can be difficult to manage and interpret. This article describes how some open-source tools and techniques have been developed and used to address these issues and make FCA more widely available and applicable. Three examples of real data sets, and real problems related to them, are used to illustrate the application of the tools and techniques and demonstrate how FCA can be used as a semantic technology to discover knowledge. Furthermore, it is shown how these tools and techniques enable FCA to deliver a visual and intuitive means of mining large data sets for association and implication rules that complements the semantic analysis. In fact, it transpires that FCA reveals hidden meaning in data that can then be examined in more detail using an FCA approach to traditional data mining methods.

Analyzing Crowd-Sourced Information and Social Media for Crisis Management

“…The process terminates with the output of XML versions of the scanned documents, containing metadata of the original documents as distinct XML elements, as well as all identified entities extracted from the conceptual and contextual extraction processes, as explained in the paragraphs above. Finally, through a process of data booleanization and discretization [3], the data are transformed into formal contexts, making the data accessible by the knowledge discovery and intuitive, conceptual visualization techniques [4] of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). For an overview of FCA see section 1.6.…”