Some Notes on Polyadic Concept Analysis

Abstract: Despite the popularity of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) as a mathematical framework for data analysis, some of its extensions are still considered arcane. Polyadic Concept Analysis (PCA) is one of the most promising yet understudied of these extensions. This formalism offers many interesting open questions but is hindered in its dissemination by complex notations and a lack of agreed-upon basic definitions. In this paper, we discuss in a mostly informal way the fundamental differences between FCA and PCA in the relation between contexts, conceptual structures, and rules. We identify open questions, present partial results on the maximal size of concept n-lattices and suggest new research directions.