A Novel Approach of Rough Conditional Entropy-Based Attribute Selection for Incomplete Decision System

Abstract

Pawlak's classical rough set theory has been applied in analyzing ordinary information systems and decision systems. However, few studies have been carried out on the attribute selection problem in incomplete decision systems because of its complexity. It is therefore necessary to investigate effective algorithms to deal with this issue. In this paper, a new rough conditional entropy-based uncertainty measure is introduced to evaluate the significance of subsets of attributes in incomplete decision systems. Furthermore, some important properties of rough conditional entropy are derived and three attribute selection approaches are constructed, including an exhaustive search strategy approach, a heuristic search strategy approach, and a probabilistic search strategy approach for incomplete decision systems. Moreover, several experiments on real-life incomplete data sets are conducted to assess the efficiency of the proposed approaches. The final experimental results indicate that two of these approaches can give satisfying performances in the process of attribute selection in incomplete decision systems.