A feature selection approach in the study of azorean proverbs

A paremiologic (study of proverbs) case is presented as part of a wider project based on data collected among the Azorean population. Given the considerable distance between the Azores islands, we present the hypothesis that there are significant differences in the proverbs from each island, thus permitting the identification of the native island of the interviewee, based on his or her knowledge of proverbs. In this chapter, a feature selection algorithm that combines Rough Sets and the Logical Analysis of Data (LAD) is presented. The algorithm named LAID (Logical Analysis of Inconsistent Data) deals with noisy data, and we believe that an important link was established between the two different schools with similar approaches. The algorithm was applied to a real world dataset based on data collected using thousands of interviews of Azoreans, involving an initial set of twenty-two thousand Portuguese proverbs