Narrow Results

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a natural framework to learn from examples. Indeed, learning from examples results in sets of frequent concepts whose extent contains mostly these examples. In terms of association rules, the above learning strategy can be seen as searching the premises of rules where the consequence is set. In its most classical setting, FCA considers attributes as a non-ordered set. When attributes of the context are partially ordered to form a taxonomy, Conceptual Scaling allows the taxonomy to be taken into account by producing a context completed with all attributes deduced from the taxonomy. The drawback, however, is that concept intents contain redundant information. In this article, we propose a parameterized algorithm, to learn rules in the presence of a taxonomy. It works on a non-completed context. The taxonomy is taken into account during the computation so as to remove all redundancies from intents. Simply changing one of its operations, this parameterized algorithm can compute various kinds of concept-based rules. We present instantiations of the parameterized algorithm to learn rules as well as to compute the set of frequent concepts.

We present an application of formal concept analysis aimed at representing a meaningful structure of knowledge communities in the form of a lattice-based taxonomy. The taxonomy groups together agents (community members) who develop a set of notions. If no constraints are imposed on how it is built, a knowledge community taxonomy may become extremely complex and difficult to analyze. We consider two approaches to building a concise representation, respecting the underlying structural relationships while hiding superfluous information: a pruning strategy based on the notion of concept stability and a representational improvement based on nested line diagrams and "zooming". We illustrate the methods on two examples: a community of embryologists and a community of researchers in complex systems.

This study presents a novel taxonomy of short message service campaigns, for the purpose of building an intelligent marketing system. The main issue of mass marketing is that one size does not fit everybody. In other words, it is challenging to meet different consumer needs. With the help of artificial intelligence, marketers can be supported to overcome some of these challenges. This study uses a mixed methods approach where design science and grounded theory is used to produce a short message service campaign taxonomy for a future intelligent marketing system. Data collection consisted of 386 previously active campaigns used over 33 months to build the taxonomy. An experimental study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the proposed taxonomy. The experiments involved automatic generation of campaign messages. The validity of these campaign messages, and hence the proposed taxonomy, was ascertained by analysing the messages within a business context. The study concludes that the system, intertwined with the taxonomy, performs comparably to a regular campaign. Another proof of concept is that the business context deemed the generated campaign texts to be both semantically and syntactically similar to run them in active campaigns as experiments.