On some types of covering rough sets from topological points of view

•We define the topology induced by the covering on a covering approximation space.•We use it to define the concepts of neighborhoods, closures, and components.•We study the relationships among neighborhoods, closures, and components.•Drawing on these concepts, we define several pairs of approximation operators.•We investigate the relationships among all the operators defined in this paper.

The concept of coverings is one of the fundamental concepts in topological spaces and plays a big part in the study of topological problems. This motivates the research of covering rough sets from topological points of view. From topological points of view, we can get a good insight into the essence of covering rough sets and make our discussions concise and profound. In this paper, we first construct a type of topology called the topology induced by the covering on a covering approximation space. This notion is indeed in the core of this paper. Then we use it to define the concepts of neighborhoods, closures, connected spaces, and components. Drawing on these concepts, we define several pairs of approximation operators. We not only investigate the relationships among them, but also give clear explanations of the concepts discussed in this paper. For a given covering approximation space, we can use the topology induced by the covering to investigate the topological properties of the space such as separation, connectedness, etc. Finally, a diagram is presented to show that the collection of all the lower and upper approximations considered in this paper constructs a lattice in terms of the inclusion relation ⊆.