Boston University Superfund Research Program

BU SBRP Director and project 2 researcher David Ozonoff recently presented a paper at the International Conference on Formal Concept Analysis '08 in Montreal. The paper titled "Contingency Structures and Concept Analysis" has been published in the book Formal Concept Analysis. This paper describes a generalization of a common data format and data display technique in epidemiology, the contingency table, showing that it is a type of well defined mathematical structure (Boolean algebra) and that there is a sub structure of the generalized contingency table (the so-called Galois closed sets) that has the same information but is usually  dramatically reduced in size. We then show that you can extend this substructure to include background/subject knowledge, leading to ways to examine specific kinds of implications and near implications, especially relating to cause and effect. The method has been incorporated into computer software to carry out the necessary computations.