Abstract
The aim of affective engineering is to develop a new product by translating customer affections into design factors. Affective data have so far been analyzed using a multivariate statistical analysis, but the affective data do not always have linear features assumed under normal distribution. Rough sets model is an effective method for knowledge discovery under uncertainty, imprecision and fuzziness. Rough sets model is to deal with any type of data regardless of their linearity characteristics. Therefore, this study utilizes rough sets model to extract affective knowledge from affective data. Four types of scent alternatives and four types of sounds were designed and the experiment was performed to look into affective differences in subject's preference on air conditioner. Finally, the purpose of this study also is to extract knowledge from affective data using rough sets model and to figure out the relationships between rough sets based affective engineering method and statistical one. The result of a case study shows that the proposed approach can effectively extract affective knowledge from affective data and is able to discover the relationships between customer affections and design factors. This study also shows similar results between rough sets model and statistical method, but it can be made more valuable by comparing fuzzy theory, neural network and multivariate statistical methods.