Four-Fold Formal Concept Analysis Based on Complete Idempotent Semifields

Abstract

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a well-known supervised boolean data-mining technique rooted in Lattice and Order Theory, that has several extensions to, e.g., fuzzy and idempotent semirings. At the heart of FCA lies a Galois connection between two powersets. In this paper we extend the FCA formalism to include all four Galois connections between four different semivectors spaces over idempotent semifields, at the same time. The result is 𝒦-four-fold Formal Concept Analysis (𝒦-4FCA) where 𝒦 is the idempotent semifield biasing the analysis. Since complete idempotent semifields come in dually-ordered pairs—e.g., the complete max-plus and min-plus semirings—the basic construction shows dual-order-, row–column- and Galois-connection-induced dualities that appear simultaneously a number of times to provide the full spectrum of variability. Our results lead to a fundamental theorem of 𝒦-four-fold Formal Concept Analysis that properly defines quadrilattices as 4-tuples of (order-dually) isomorphic lattices of vectors and discuss its relevance vis-à-vis previous formal conceptual analyses and some affordances of their results.