An Efficient Soft Set-Based Approach for Conflict Analysis

PLoS One. 2016 Feb 29;11(2):e0148837. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0148837. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Conflict analysis has been used as an important tool in economic, business, governmental and political dispute, games, management negotiations, military operations and etc. There are many mathematical formal models have been proposed to handle conflict situations and one of the most popular is rough set theory. With the ability to handle vagueness from the conflict data set, rough set theory has been successfully used. However, computational time is still an issue when determining the certainty, coverage, and strength of conflict situations. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to handle conflict situations, based on some ideas using soft set theory. The novelty of the proposed approach is that, unlike in rough set theory that uses decision rules, it is based on the concept of co-occurrence of parameters in soft set theory. We illustrate the proposed approach by means of a tutorial example of voting analysis in conflict situations. Furthermore, we elaborate the proposed approach on real world dataset of political conflict in Indonesian Parliament. We show that, the proposed approach achieves lower computational time as compared to rough set theory of up to 3.9%.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Models, Theoretical*

Grants and funding

This work is supported by University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant no vote UM.C/625/HIR/MOHE/SC/13/2 from Ministry of Education Malaysia.