Some Programming Optimizations for Computing Formal Concepts

This paper describes in detail some optimization approaches taken to improve the efficiency of computing formal concepts. In particular, it describes the use and manipulation of bit-arrays to represent FCA structures and carry out the typical operations undertaken in computing formal concepts, thus providing data structures that are both memoryefficient and time saving. The paper also examines the issues and compromises involved in computing and storing formal concepts, describing a number of data structures that illustrate the classical trade-off between memory footprint and code efficiency. Given that there has been limited publication of these programmatical aspects, these optimizations will be useful to programmers in this area and also to any programmers interested in optimizing software that implements Boolean data structures. The optimizations are shown to significantly increase performance by comparing an unoptimized implementation with the optimized one.