Rough set theory is a popular and powerful machine learning tool. It is especially suitable for dealing with information systems that exhibit inconsistencies, i.e. objects that have the same values for the conditional attributes but a different value for the decision attribute. In line with the emerging granular computing paradigm, rough set theory groups objects together based on the indiscernibility of their attribute values. Fuzzy rough set theory extends rough set theory to data with continuous attributes, and detects degrees of inconsistency in the data. Key to this is turning the indiscernibility relation into a gradual relation, acknowledging that objects can be similar to a certain extent. In very large datasets with millions of objects, computing the gradual indiscernibility relation (or in other words, the soft granules) is very demanding, both in terms of runtime and in terms of memory. It is however required for the computation of the lower and upper approximations of concepts in the fuzzy rough set analysis pipeline. Current non-distributed implementations in R are limited by memory capacity. For example, we found that a state of the art non-distributed implementation in R could not handle 30,000 rows and 10 attributes on a node with 62GB of memory. This is clearly insufficient to scale fuzzy rough set analysis to massive datasets. In this paper we present a parallel and distributed solution based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) to compute fuzzy rough approximations in very large information systems. Our results show that our parallel approach scales with problem size to information systems with millions of objects. To the best of our knowledge, no other parallel and distributed solutions have been proposed so far in the literature for this problem.

When a Web application with a built-in recommender offers a social networking component which enables its users to form a trust network, it can generate more personalized recommendations by combining user ratings with information from the trust network. These are the so-called trust-enhanced recommendation systems. While research on the incorporation of trust for recommendations is thriving, the potential of explicitly stated distrust remains almost unexplored. In this article, we introduce a distrust-enhanced recommendation algorithm which has its roots in Golbeck's trust-based weighted mean. Through experiments on a set of reviews from Epinions.com, we show that our new algorithm outperforms its standard trust-only counterpart with respect to accuracy, thereby demonstrating the positive effect that explicit distrust can have on trust-based recommendations.

Algorithms for clustering Web search results have to be efficient and robust. Furthermore they must be able to cluster a data set without using any kind of a priori information, such as the required number of clusters. Clustering algorithms inspired by the behavior of real ants generally meet these requirements. In this article we propose a novel approach to ant-based clustering, based on fuzzy logic. We show that it improves existing approaches and illustrates how our algorithm can be applied to the problem of Web search results clustering. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 455–474, 2007.

The task of finding shortest paths in weighted graphs is one of the archetypical problems encountered in the domain of combinatorial optimization and has been studied intensively over the past five decades. More recently, fuzzy weighted graphs, along with generalizations of algorithms for finding optimal paths within them, have emerged as an adequate modeling tool for prohibitively complex and/or inherently imprecise systems. We review and formalize these algorithms, paying special attention to the ranking methods used for path comparison. We show which criteria must be met for algorithm correctness and present an efficient method, based on defuzzification of fuzzy weights, for finding optimal paths. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 1051–1068, 2004.