Copyright © 2011 Zhaohao Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Rough set theory is a powerful tool for dealing with uncertainty, granularity, and incompleteness of knowledge in information systems. This paper discusses five types of existing neighborhood-based generalized rough sets. The concepts of minimal neighborhood description and maximal neighborhood description of an element are defined, and by means of the two concepts, the properties and structures of the third and the fourth types of neighborhood-based rough sets are deeply explored. Furthermore, we systematically study the covering reduction of the third and the fourth types of neighborhood-based rough sets in terms of the two concepts. Finally, two open problems proposed by Yun et al. (2011) are solved.