=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1466/paper18
|storemode=property
|title=From an Implicational System to its Corresponding D-basis
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1466/paper18.pdf
|volume=Vol-1466
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cla/LorenzoACEM15
}}
==From an Implicational System to its Corresponding D-basis==
From an implicational system to its
corresponding D-basis
Estrella Rodrı́guez-Lorenzo1 , Kira Adaricheva2 , Pablo Cordero1 , Manuel
Enciso1 , and Angel Mora1
1
University of Málaga, Andalucı́a Tech, Spain,
e-mail: {estrellarodlor,amora}@ctima.uma.es, pcordero@uma.es, enciso@lcc.uma.es
2
Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan
e-mail: kira.adaricheva@nu.edu.kz
Abstract. Closure system is a fundamental concept appearing in several
areas such as databases, formal concept analysis, artificial intelligence,
etc. It is well-known that there exists a connection between a closure
operator on a set and the lattice of its closed sets. Furthermore, the
closure system can be replaced by a set of implications but this set has
usually a lot of redundancy inducing non desired properties.
In the literature, there is a common interest in the search of the mini-
mality of a set of implications because of the importance of bases. The
well-known Duquenne-Guigues basis satisfies this minimality condition.
However, several authors emphasize the relevance of the optimality in
order to reduce the size of implications in the basis. In addition to this,
some bases have been defined to improve the computation of closures
relying on the directness property. The efficiency of computation with
the direct basis is achieved due to the fact that the closure is computed
in one traversal.
In this work, we focus on the D-basis, which is ordered-direct. An open
problem is to obtain it from an arbitrary implicational system, so it is
our aim in this paper. We introduce a method to compute the D-basis
by means of minimal generators calculated using the Simplification Logic
for implications.
1 Introduction
Discovering knowledge and information retrieval are currently active issues where
Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) provides tools and methods for data analysis.
The notions around the concept lattice may be considered as the main attractions
in Formal Concept Analysis and they are strongly connected to the notion of
closure.
Closure system is a fundamental concept appearing in several areas such as
database theory, formal concept analysis, artificial intelligence, etc. It is well-
known that there exists a connection between a closure operator on a set and
the lattice of its closed sets. Furthermore, the closure system can be presented,
dually, as a set of attribute implications, namely an implicational system but
this set has usually a lot of redundancy inducing non-desired properties.
c paper author(s), 2015. Published in Sadok Ben Yahia, Jan Konecny (Eds.): CLA
2015, pp. 217–228, ISBN 978–2–9544948–0–7, Blaise Pascal University, LIMOS
laboratory, Clermont-Ferrand, 2015. Copying permitted only for private and
academic purposes.
218 Estrella Rodríguez-Lorenzo et al.
We can not fail to mention the relevance of the role of the implication notion
in different areas. It was the main actor of the normalization theory in database
area; it has an outstanding character in Formal Concept Analysis and it was
prominently used in Frequent Set Mining and Learning Spaces, see the survey
of M. Wild [10]. The latter is devoted to mathematical theory of implications
and the different faces of the concept of an implication. Implications linked data
represented in several forms going from the relationship between itemsets in
transactions (Frequent Set Mining) to the boolean functions (Horn Theory).
Nonetheless, as V. Duquenne says in [6] “it is surprising if not hard to ac-
knowledge that we did not learn much more on their intimacy in the meantime,
despite many interesting papers using or revisiting them”. We believe there is a
long way to go, and a deeper theory on properties of implications with automated
and efficient methods to manipulate them can be developed.
In this paper, we are focused in the Formal Concept Analysis area and the
fundamental notions are assumed (see [7]). The task of information retrieval
carried out by the tools in FCA conduits to infer concepts from the data set,
i.e. to deduce (in an automated way) a set of objects that may be precisely
characterized by a set of attributes. Such concepts inherit an order relation
induced by attribute set inclusion, providing a lattice structure of the concept set.
Here implications are retrieved from a binary table (formal context) representing
the relationship between a set of objects and a set of attributes. Implications
represent an alternative way for the underlying information contained in the
formal context.
Many applications must massively compute closures of sets of attributes and
any improvement of execution time is relevant. In [9] the author establishes the
necessity of obtaining succinct representation of closure operators to achieve an
efficient computational usage. In this direction, properties associated to implica-
tions are studied to render equivalent sets fulfilling desired properties, directness
and optimality.
An important matter in FCA is to transform implicational systems in canon-
ical forms for special proposals in order to provide an efficient further man-
agement. Hence, some alternative definitions have been established: Duquenne-
Guigues basis, direct optimal basis, D-basis, etc. In this work we focus on the
last one [1], because it combines, in a balanced way, a brief representation (it
has a small number of elements) and a efficient computation of closures (it is
computed in just one traversal). To this end, D-basis proposes an order in which
implications will be attended.
The major issue is that the execution of the D-basis in one iteration is more
efficient that the execution of a shorter, but un-ordered one, for instance the
canonical basis of Duquenne and Guigues. K. Adaricheva et.al prove in [1] that
one can extract the D-basis from any direct unit basis Σ in time polynomial
of size of Σ, and it takes only linear time of the number of implications of the
D-basis to put it into a proper order.
In [5] we have proposed a method to calculate all the minimal generators from
a set of implications as a way to remove redundancy in the basis. The method
From an implicational system to its corresponding D-basis 219
to compute all the minimal generators is based on the Simplification Logic for
implications [8]. Using this logic we are able to remove redundancy in the impli-
cations [4] and following the same style of application of the Simplification Rule
to the set of implications we can obtain all the minimal generators.
Currently the retrieval of the D-basis from an arbitrary implicational sys-
tem is an open problem, so it becomes our aim in this paper. We introduce a
method to compute the D-basis by means of minimal generators calculated us-
ing the Simplification Logic for implications. The relationship among minimal
generators, covers, minimal covers and D-basis is presented and an algorithm to
calculate D-basis from an arbitrary set of implications is proposed.
Section 2 presents the main notions necessary to the understanding of the
new method: closure operators, the D-basis, Simplification Logic and the method
to calculate minimal generators. In Section 3, the relationships between covers
and generators are presented. In Section 4, the new method to obtain the D-
basis from a set of implications is shown, and some conclusions and extensions
are proposed in Section 5.
2 Background
2.1 Closure systems
Given a non-empty set M and the set1 2M of all its subsets, a closure operator
is a map φ : 2M → 2M that satisfies the following, for all X, Y ∈ 2M :
(1) increasing: X ⊆ φ(X);
(2) isotone: X ⊆ Y implies φ(X) ⊆ φ(Y );
(3) idempotent: φ(φ(X)) = φ(X).
We will refer to the pair hM, φi of a set M and a closure operator on it as a
closure system.
In the next two subsections we will follow the introduction of the implica-
tional system based on the minimal proper covers 2 given in [1], which was named
there the D-basis.
We will call closure system reduced, if φ({x}) = φ({y}) → x = y, for any
x, y ∈ M 3 . If the closure system hM, φi is not reduced, one can modify it to
produce an equivalent one that is reduced, see [1] for more details.
We will now define a closure operator φ∗ , which is associated with a given
operator φ.
hM, φi be a closure system. Define φ∗ as a self-map on 2M
Definition 1. Let S
∗
such that φ (X) = x∈X φ(x), X ⊆ 2M .
It is straightforward to verify that
1
In the FCA framework, that set M can be thought a set of attributes of a context.
2
Although in [1] it was introduced as minimal cover, here we name it minimal proper
cover because in this paper we generalize the notion of cover in Section 3.
3
To clarify the notation φ({x}) will be represented as φ(x) if no risk of confusion.
220 Estrella Rodríguez-Lorenzo et al.
Lemma 1. φ∗ is a closure operator on M .
Given a closure system hM, φi, we introduce several important concepts.
Definition 2 ([1]). For x ∈ M we call a subset X ⊆ M a proper cover for x if
x ∈ φ(X) \ φ∗ (X). If X is a proper cover for x, it will be denoted as x ∼p X.
2.2 The D-basis
In this subsection, we briefly summarize the introduction of the D-basis in [1].
Its definition is strongly based on the notion of a minimal proper cover:
Definition 3. A proper cover Y for x is called minimal, if, for any other proper
cover Z for x, Z ⊆ φ∗ (Y ) implies Y ⊆ Z.
The existence of several proper covers for the same element induces the need
to introduce the notion of minimality.
Lemma 2. If x ∼p X, then there exists Y such that x ∼p Y , Y ⊆ φ∗ (X) and
Y is a minimal proper cover for x. In other words, every proper cover can be
reduced to a minimal proper cover under the subset relation added with the φ∗
operator.
These ideas bring to the following definition of the implicational system defin-
ing the reduced closure system by means of the minimal proper covers.
Definition 4. Given a reduced closure system hM, φi, define the D-basis ΣD
as a union of two subsets of implications:
1. {y → x : x ∈ φ(y) \ y, y ∈ M } (such implications are called binary);
2. {X → x : X is a minimal proper cover for x}.
Note that the D-basis belongs to the family of the unit bases, i.e. implica-
tional sets where each implication A → b has a singleton b ∈ M as a consequent.
Lemma 3. ΣD generates hM, φi.
2.3 Ordered direct set of implications
Here we recall the notion of the ordered direct basis introduced in [1], which is
designed for a quick computation of the closures based on some fixed order of
implications. First we recall the definition of the ordered iteration of implications.
Definition 5. Suppose the set of implications Σ is equipped with some linear
order, or equivalently, the implications are indexed as Σ = {s1 , s2 , . . . , sn }. De-
fine a mapping ρΣ : 2M → 2M associated with this ordering as follows. For any
X ⊆ M , let X0 = X. If Xk is computed and implication sk+1 is A → B, then
Xk ∪ B, if A ⊆ Xk ,
Xk+1 =
Xk , otherwise.
Finally, ρΣ (X) = Xn . We will call ρΣ an ordered iteration of Σ.
From an implicational system to its corresponding D-basis 221
The concept of the ordered iteration is central for the definition of the ordered
direct basis. For any given set of implications Σ on set M , by φΣ we understand
the closure operator on M defined by Σ. Equivalently, the fixed points of φΣ
are exactly subsets X ⊆ M which are stable for all implications A → B in Σ: if
A ⊆ X, then B ⊆ X.
Definition 6. The set of implications with some linear ordering on it, hΣ, a , ...Yk... a , ...Yk...
.... ....
.... ....
Implicational System Set of (non trivial) Closed sets Set of Covers Set of Minimal Covers
and Minimal Generators
Fig. 1. Stages of D-basis algorithm
Thus, let a be an attribute and mg be the set of minimal generators such that
its closure contains a. We write this association as a pair ha, mgi. Let Φ be a
set of such pairs of attributes with their generators. We define the Function Add
which builds the set of covers produced in Stage 2 as follows:
Add(ha, mgi, Φ) = {ha, {g ∈ mg|a 6∈ g} ∪ {mga }i : ha, mga i ∈ Φ}
Then, in stage 3, the algorithm picks up the set of minimal covers from the set
obtained in stage 2 using the Function MinimalCovers. The method ends with
the Function OrderedComp which applies Composition Rule at the same time
that it orders the implications in the following sense: the first implications in the
D-basis are the binary ones (those with the left-hand side being a singleton).
Algorithm 1: D-basis
input : An implicational system Σ on M
output: The D-basis ΣD on M
begin
MinGen:=MinGen0 (M , Σ)
C:= ∅
foreach hC, mg(C)i ∈MinGen do
foreach a ∈ C do
C:=Add(ha, mg(C)i, C)
ΣD := ∅
foreach ha, mga i ∈ C do
mga :=MinimalCovers(mga )
foreach g ∈ mga do ΣD := ΣD ∪ {g → a} ;
OrderedComp(ΣD )
return ΣD
Example 5. Algorithm 1 returns the following D-basis from the input implica-
tional system of Example 3:
ΣD = {a → d, bce → ad, ab → ce, ae → bc, bde → ac, cd → abe}
From an implicational system to its corresponding D-basis 227
We emphasize that although ac is a minimal generator, it is not a minimal
cover, thus an implication with ac in the left-hand side is redundant (deduced
from inference axioms) and hence should not appear in the D-basis.
A detailed illustrative example
In the conclusion of this section we show the execution of the method, in all its
stages, on a set of implications from [3], which was used later to illustrate the
D-basis definition in [1].
Σ = {5 → 4, 23 → 4, 24 → 3, 34 → 2, 14 → 235, 25 → 134, 35 → 124, 15 → 24, 123 → 45}
As a first step in the algorithm, MinGen0 renders the following set of pairs of
closed sets and its non-trivial minimal generators, see Figure 2:
{h12345, {123, 14, 15, 25, 35}i, h234, {23, 24, 34}i, h45, {5}i, h∅, ∅i}
5⟶4, 2 3⟶4, 2 4⟶3, 3 4⟶2, 1 4⟶2 3 5, 2 5⟶1 3 4, 3 5⟶1 2 4, 1 5⟶2 4, 1 2 3⟶4 5
ø⟶5 ø⟶2 4 ø⟶1 4 ø⟶3 5 ø⟶1 2 3
4 5 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
1⟶2 3, 2⟶1 3, 3⟶1 2 1⟶5, 5⟶1 ø ø ø
{1 4} {3 5} {1 2 3}
{5} {2 4}
ø⟶1 ø⟶5 ø⟶2 5 ø⟶1 5
1 5 1 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5
ø⟶1 ø⟶2 ø⟶3 ø ø ø ø
{1 2 4} {2 4 5}
1 2 3 1 2 3 {2 5}
1 2 3 {1 5}
ø ø ø
{1 5} {2 5} {3 5}
ø⟶2 3 ø⟶3 4
2 3 4 2 3 4
1⟶5, 5⟶1 1⟶5, 5⟶1
{2 3} {3 4}
ø⟶1 ø⟶5 ø⟶1 ø⟶5
1 5 1 5 1 5 1 5
ø ø ø ø
{1 2 3} {2 3 5} {1 3 4} {3 4 5}
Fig. 2. MinGen0 Execution
Then, for each closed set and each of its elements, our algorithm renders the
following set of pairs of elements and covers:
{h1, {25, 35}i, h2, {14, 15, 35, 34}i, h3, {14, 15, 25, 24}i,
h4, {123, 15, 25, 35, 5, 23}i, h5, {123, 14}i}
For each element, the Function MinimalCovers picks up its minimal covers:
{h1, {25, 35}i, h2, {14, 34}i, h3, {14, 24}i, h4, {5, 23}i, h5, {14, 123}i}
Finally, at the last step, the algorithm turns these pairs into implications and
applies ordered composition resulting in the D-basis.
ΣD = {5 → 4, 23 → 4, 24 → 3, 34 → 2, 14 → 235, 25 → 1, 35 → 1, 123 → 5}
228 Estrella Rodríguez-Lorenzo et al.
5 Conclusion and future works
In this work we have presented a way to obtain the D-basis from any implica-
tional system. In [1] the algorithm was proposed to compute the D-basis from
any direct basis, but the computation from any implicational system was left
open. There exists also an efficient algorithm for the computation of the D-basis
from the context using the method of finding the minimal transversals of the
associated hypergraphs [2], but this assumes the different input for the closure
system which is outside the scope of this paper.
The Function MinimalCovers renders the D-basis within the framework of
the closure systems without the need of any transformation. A key point of our
work is the connection between covers and generators. Using minimal gener-
ators, the D-basis is obtained by reducing the set of minimal generators and
transforming it into a set of minimal covers.
As future work, we propose to develop an algorithm which computes the
D-basis with better integration of the minimal generator computation to render
the minimal covers in a more direct way. In addition, we are planning to design
an empirical study and to make a comparison between this algorithm and other
techniques proposed in previous papers.
Acknowledgment
Supported by Grants TIN2011-28084 and TIN2014-59471-P of the Science and
Innovation Ministry of Spain.
References
1. K. Adaricheva and J. B. Nation and R. Rand, Ordered direct implicational basis of
a finite closure system, Discrete Applied Mathematics, 161 (6): 707–723, 2013.
2. K. Adaricheva and J.B. Nation, Discovery of the D-basis in binary tables based on
hypergraph dualization, http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02875, 2015.
3. K. Bertet, B. Monjardet, The multiple facets of the canonical direct unit implica-
tional basis, Theor. Comput. Sci., 411(22-24): 2155–2166, 2010.
4. P. Cordero, A Mora, M. Enciso, I.Pérez de Guzmán, SLFD Logic: Elimination of
Data Redundancy in Knowledge Representation, LNCS, 2527: 141–150, 2002.
5. P. Cordero, M. Enciso, A Mora, M. Ojeda-Aciego, Computing Minimal Generators
from Implications: a Logic-guided Approach, CLA 2012: 187–198, 2012.
6. V. Duquenne, Some variations on Alan Day’s Algorithm for Calculating Canonical
Basis of Implications, CLA 2007: 192–207, 2007.
7. B. Ganter, Two basic algorithms in concept analysis, Technische Hochschule,
Darmstadt, 1984.
8. A. Mora, M. Enciso, P. Cordero, I. Fortes, Closure via functional dependence sim-
plification, International Journal of Computer Mathematics, 89(4): 510–526, 2012.
9. S. Rudolph, Some Notes on Managing Closure Operators, LNCS, 7278: 278–291,
2012.
10. M. Wild, The joy of implications, aka pure Horn functions: mainly a survey, http:
//arxiv.org/abs/1411.6432, 2014.