A system and method for determining the classification of a signal, or the identification of an object is provided. Based on rough set theory, or data mining, a training data set is partitioned and labeled with a multi-class entropy method. Reducts are calculated from a subset of the best-performing columns of the partitioned and labeled training set data. These reducts are applied to test signals and combined for each signal classification. The present system and method produces a more accurate, robust and efficient classification result.