Attribute Reduction in Soft Contexts Based on Soft Sets and Its Application to Formal Contexts

Abstract

We introduce the notion of the reduct of soft contexts, which is a special notion of a consistent set for soft contexts. Then, we study its properties and show that this notion is well explained by the two classes, 1 0 and 2 0 , of independent attributes. In particular, we describe in detail how to extract a reduct from a given consistent set. Then, based on this extraction process, we propose a six-step method for constructing a reduct from a given consistent set. Additionally, to apply this method to formal contexts, we examine the relationship between the reducts of a given formal context and the reducts of the associated soft context. We finally illustrate the process of obtaining reducts in a formal context using this relationship and the six-step method using an example.