Extracting attribute implications from a formal context: Unifying the basic approaches

Abstract

There have been several pioneering approaches to the extraction of attribute implications from a formal context, dating from the 1980’s: the one of Guigues and Duquenne based on so-called non-redundancy nodes, another one proposed by Ganter highlighting the concept of pseudo-closed set, and the best-known one relying on the recursive computation of so-called pseudo-intents in the book by Ganter and Wille. The Guigues and Duquenne approach has never been compared in detail in the literature with the other two, although they turn out to be equivalent. This paper tries to fill this gap, proposing a unified view, hopefully more easy to grasp.