From formal concepts to analogical complexes

International audienceReasoning by analogy is an important component of common sense reasoning whose formalization has undergone recent improvements with the logical and algebraic study of the analogical proportion. The starting point of this study considers analogical proportions on a formal context. We introduce analogical complexes, a companion of formal concepts formed by using analogy between four subsets of objects in place of the initial binary relation. They represent subsets of objects and attributes that share a maximal analogical relation. We show that the set of all complexes can be structured in an analogical complex lattice and give explicit formulae for the computation of their infimum and supremum