A Clustering-Based Evidence Reasoning Method

Abstract

Aiming at the counterintuitive phenomena of the Dempster–Shafer method in combining the highly conflictive evidences, a combination method of evidences based on the clustering analysis is proposed in this paper. At first, the cause of conflicts is disclosed from the point of view of the internal and external contradiction. And then, a new similarity measure based on it is proposed by comprehensively considering the Pignistic distance and the sequence according to the size of the basic belief assignments over focal elements. This measure is used to calculate the commonality function of evidences to amend the evidence sources; Meanwhile, the Iterative Self-organizing Data Analysis Techniques Algorithm (ISODATA) method based on the new measure is used for clustering according to the clustering characters of the original evidences. The Dempster rule is applied to combining all the evidences in each clustering into an evidential representative, and the reliability is calculated based on the commonality and the occurrence frequency of the evidences in the clustering. At last, Murphy's method is used to combine these evidential representatives of the different clusterings. The experimental results through a series of numeric examples show that the method proposed in this paper is more effective and superior to others.