Identifying ecological traits: a concrete FCA-based approach

International audienceThis paper describes a method to identify so-called ecological traits of species based on the analysis of their biological characteristics. This biological dataset has a complex structure that can be formalized as a fuzzy many-valued context and transformed into a binary context through histogram scaling. The core of the method relied on the construction and interpretation of formal concepts and was used on a 50 species x 124 histogram attributes table. The concepts were analyzed with the help of an hydrobiologist, leading to a set of ecological traits which were inserted in the original context for validation