Exploring Attributes with Domain Knowledge in Formal Concept Analysis

Recent literature reports the growing interests in data analysis using Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), in which data is represented in the form of object and attribute relations. FCA analyzes and then subsequently visualizes the data based on duality called Galois connection. Attribute exploration is a knowledge acquisition process in FCA, which interactively determines the implications holding between the attributes. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the attribute exploration to understand the dependencies among the attributes in the data. While performing this process, we add domain experts’ knowledge as background knowledge. We demonstrate the method through experiments on two real world healthcare datasets. The results show that the knowledge acquired through exploration process coupled with domain expert knowledge has better classification accuracy.