Effective procedures for handling possible equivalence relations in non-deterministic information systems

This paper presents a tool for handling equivalence relations in non-deterministic information systems. Some applications of equivalence relations are also shown. In a deterministic information system, it is possible to define an equivalence relation for any set of attributes. However, in a non-deterministic information system, some kinds of equivalence relations which we call possible equivalence relations are definable. This paper proposes two effective procedures producing all possible equivalence relations for any non-deterministic information system and any set of attributes. The details of algorithms, the implementation of algorithms and applications to the rule extraction, etc. are presented.