Characterizing Trees in Concept Lattices

Concept lattices are systems of conceptual clusters, called formal concepts, which are partially ordered by the subconcept/superconcept relationship. Concept lattices are basic structures used in formal concept analysis. In general, a concept lattice may contain overlapping clusters and need not be a tree. On the other hand, tree-like classification schemes are appealing and are produced by several clustering methods. In this paper, we present necessary and sufficient conditions on input data for the output concept lattice to form a tree after one removes its least element. We present these conditions for input data with yes/no attributes as well as for input data with fuzzy attributes. In addition, we show how Lindig’s algorithm for computing concept lattices gets simplified when applied to input data for which the associated concept lattice is a tree after removing the least element. The paper also contains illustrative examples.