The volume LNAI 12872 constitutes the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Rough Sets, IJCRS 2021, Bratislava, Slovak Republic, in September 2021. The conference was held as a hybrid event due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 13 full paper and 7 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions, along with 5 invited papers. The papers are grouped in the following topical sections: core rough set models and methods, related methods and hybridization, and areas of applications.