Effective Value Analysis of Fuzzy Similarity Relation in HQSS for Efficient Granulation

Hierarchical quotient space structure (HQSS), as a typical description of granular computing (GrC), focuses on hierarchically granulating fuzzy data and mining hidden knowledge. The key step of constructing HQSS is to transform the fuzzy similarity relation into fuzzy equivalence relation. However, on one hand, the transformation process has high time complexity. On the other hand, it is difficult to mine knowledge directly from fuzzy similarity relation due to its information redundancy, i.e., sparsity of effective information. Therefore, this article mainly focuses on proposing an efficient granulation approach for constructing HQSS by quickly extracting the effective value of fuzzy similarity relation. First, the effective value and effective position of fuzzy similarity relation are defined according to whether they could be retained in fuzzy equivalence relation. Second, the number and composition of effective values are presented to confirm that which elements are effective values. Based on these above theories, redundant information and sparse effective information in fuzzy similarity relation could be completely distinguished. Next, both isomorphism and similarity between two fuzzy similarity relations are researched based on the effective value. The isomorphism between two fuzzy equivalence relations is discussed based on the effective value. Then, the algorithm with low time complexity for extracting effective values of fuzzy similarity relation is introduced. On the basis, the algorithm for constructing HQSS is presented to realize efficient granulation of fuzzy data. The proposed algorithms could accurately extract effective information from the fuzzy similarity relation and construct the same HQSS with the fuzzy equivalence relation while greatly reducing the time complexity. Finally, relevant experiments on 15 UCI datasets, 3 UKB datasets, and 5 image datasets are shown and analyzed to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.