Geometric lattice structure of covering and its application to attribute
  reduction through matroids
  The reduction of covering decision systems is an important problem in data
mining, and covering-based rough sets serve as an efficient technique to
process the problem. Geometric lattices have been widely used in many fields,
especially greedy algorithm design which plays an important role in the
reduction problems. Therefore, it is meaningful to combine coverings with
geometric lattices to solve the optimization problems. In this paper, we obtain
geometric lattices from coverings through matroids and then apply them to the
issue of attribute reduction. First, a geometric lattice structure of a
covering is constructed through transversal matroids. Then its atoms are
studied and used to describe the lattice. Second, considering that all the
closed sets of a finite matroid form a geometric lattice, we propose a
dependence space through matroids and study the attribute reduction issues of
the space, which realizes the application of geometric lattices to attribute
reduction. Furthermore, a special type of information system is taken as an
example to illustrate the application. In a word, this work points out an
interesting view, namely, geometric lattice to study the attribute reduction
issues of information systems.
