While we applaud the promise and value of generative artificial intelligence and Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer–like tools, leveraging their potential and values heavily depends on what we use them for and how, while also acknowledging and addressing their limits, limitations, and concerns.

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), in which data is represented as a formal context, offers a framework for Association Rules Mining (ARM) by handling functional dependencies in the data. However, with the size of the formal context, the number of rules grows exponentially. In this article, we apply Fuzzy K-Means clustering on the data set to reduce the formal context and FCA on the reduced data set for mining association rules. With experiments on two real-world healthcare data sets, we offer the evidence for performance of FKM-based FCA in mining association rules.

In recent years, FCA has received significant attention from research communities of various fields. Further, the theory of FCA is being extended into different frontiers and augmented with other knowledge representation frameworks. In this backdrop, this paper aims to provide an understanding of the necessary mathematical background for each extension of FCA like FCA with granular computing, a fuzzy setting, interval-valued, possibility theory, triadic, factor concepts and handling incomplete data. Subsequently, the paper illustrates emerging trends for each extension with applications. To this end, we summarize more than 350 recent (published after 2011) research papers indexed in Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Scopus, SpringerLink, and a few authoritative fundamental papers.