Generation of reducts and rules in multi-attribute and multi-criteria classification

The paper addresses the problem of analysing information tables which contain objects described by both attributes and criteria, i.e. attributes with preference-ordered scales. The objects contained in those tables, representing exemplary decisions made by a decision maker or a domain expert, are usually classified into one of several classes that are also often preference-ordered. Analysis of such data using the classic rough set methodology may produce improper results, as the original rough set approach is not able to discover inconsistencies originating from consideration of typical criteria, like e.g. product quality, market share or debt ratio. The paper presents the framework for the analysis of both attributes and criteria and a very promising algorithm for generating reducts. The algorithm presented is evaluated in an experiment with real-life data sets and its results are compared to those by two other reduct generating algorithms.