Dominance-based rough sets approach (DRSA) is an effective tool to deal with information with preference-ordered attribute domains and decision classes. Any information system may evolve when new objects enter into or old objects get out. Approximations of DRSA need update for decision analysis or other relative tasks. Incremental updating is a feasible and effective technique to update approximations. The purpose of this paper is to present an incremental approach for updating approximations of DRSA. The approach is applicable to dynamic information systems when the set of objects varies over time. In this paper, we discuss the principles of incrementally updating P -dominating sets and P -dominated sets and propose an incremental approach for updating approximations of DRSA. A numerical example is given to illustrate the incremental approach. The experimental evaluations on data sets from UCI show that the incremental approach outperforms the original nonincremental one. C � 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.