  The introduction of covering-based rough sets has made a substantial
contribution to the classical rough sets. However, many vital problems in rough
sets, including attribution reduction, are NP-hard and therefore the algorithms
for solving them are usually greedy. Matroid, as a generalization of linear
independence in vector spaces, it has a variety of applications in many fields
such as algorithm design and combinatorial optimization. An excellent
introduction to the topic of rough matroids is due to Zhu and Wang. On the
basis of their work, we study the rough matroids based on coverings in this
paper. First, we investigate some properties of the definable sets with respect
to a covering. Specifically, it is interesting that the set of all definable
sets with respect to a covering, equipped with the binary relation of inclusion
$\subseteq$, constructs a lattice. Second, we propose the rough matroids based
on coverings, which are a generalization of the rough matroids based on
relations. Finally, some properties of rough matroids based on coverings are
explored. Moreover, an equivalent formulation of rough matroids based on
coverings is presented. These interesting and important results exhibit many
potential connections between rough sets and matroids.
