Optimal Scale Combination Selection Integrating Three-Way Decision With Hasse Diagram

Multi-scale decision system (MDS) is an effective tool to describe hierarchical data in machine learning. Optimal scale combination (OSC) selection and attribute reduction are two key issues related to knowledge discovery in MDSs. However, searching for all OSCs may result in a combinatorial explosion, and the existing approaches typically incur excessive time consumption. In this study, searching for all OSCs is considered as an optimization problem with the scale space as the search space. Accordingly, a sequential three-way decision model of the scale space is established to reduce the search space by integrating three-way decision with the Hasse diagram. First, a novel scale combination is proposed to perform scale selection and attribute reduction simultaneously, and then an extended stepwise optimal scale selection (ESOSS) method is introduced to quickly search for a single local OSC on a subset of the scale space. Second, based on the obtained local OSCs, a sequential three-way decision model of the scale space is established to divide the search space into three pair-wise disjoint regions, namely the positive, negative, and boundary regions. The boundary region is regarded as a new search space, and it can be proved that a local OSC on the boundary region is also a global OSC. Therefore, all OSCs of a given MDS can be obtained by searching for the local OSCs on the boundary regions in a step-by-step manner. Finally, according to the properties of the Hasse diagram, a formula for calculating the maximal elements of a given boundary region is provided to alleviate space complexity. Accordingly, an efficient OSC selection algorithm is proposed to improve the efficiency of searching for all OSCs by reducing the search space. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce computational time.