A Heuristic Attribute-Reduction Algorithm Based on Conditional Entropy for Incomplete Information Systems

Abstract

With the continuous expansion of databases, the extraction of information has been an urgent research topic in many fields. As an effective method to remove redundant attributes, attribute reduction demonstrates extraordinary ability in simplifying information systems. This paper applies a novel form of conditional entropy to investigate the attribute reduction in incomplete information systems. Firstly, a novel definition of conditional entropy is introduced based on tolerance relation. Additionally, in order to reduce time complexity, we propose a binsearch heuristic attribute-reduction algorithm with conditional entropy as heuristic knowledge. Furthermore, two examples are used to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the reduction algorithm.

Keywords

• attribute reduction
• conditional entropy
• binsearch heuristic algorithm
• tolerance relation
• incomplete information system