A Modal Logic for Possibilistic Reasoning with Fuzzy Formal Contexts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weighted modal logic for possibilistic reasoning in fuzzy formal contexts, extending formal concept analysis and providing sound and complete axiomatizations for necessity and sufficiency modalities.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-sort weighted modal logic tailored for fuzzy formal contexts, with axiomatization, expressiveness, and extensions to multi-relational fuzzy contexts.

Findings

Logic is sound and complete for fuzzy context models.

The logic can represent generalized fuzzy formal concepts.

Extensions to multi-relational fuzzy contexts are feasible.

Abstract

We introduce a two-sort weighted modal logic for possibilistic reasoning with fuzzy formal contexts. The syntax of the logic includes two types of weighted modal operators corresponding to classical necessity ($\Box$) and sufficiency ($\boxminus$) modalities and its formulas are interpreted in fuzzy formal contexts based on possibility theory. We present its axiomatization that is \emph{sound} with respect to the class of all fuzzy context models. In addition, both the necessity and sufficiency fragments of the logic are also individually complete with respect to the class of all fuzzy context models. We highlight the expressive power of the logic with some illustrative examples. As a formal context is the basic construct of formal concept analysis (FCA), we generalize three main notions in FCA, i.e., formal concepts, object oriented concepts, and property oriented concepts, to their corresponding $c$-cut concepts in fuzzy formal contexts. Then, we show that our logical language can represent all three of these generalized notions. Finally, we demonstrate the possibility of extending our logic to reasoning with multi-relational fuzzy contexts, in which the Boolean combinations of different fuzzy relations are allowed.