A flexible rule for evidential combination in Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence

Abstract

Dempster’s combination rule in Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence is widely used to combine multiple pieces of evidence. However, when the evidence is severely conflicting, the result could be counter-intuitive. Thus, many alternative combination rules have been proposed to address this issue. Nevertheless, the existing ones sometimes behave not very well. This may be because they do not hold some essential properties. To this end, this paper firstly identifies some of the important properties. Then, following the cues from these properties, we propose a novel evidential combination rule as a remediation of Dempster’s combination rule in Dempster–Shafertheory. Our new rule is based on the concept of complete conflict (we introduced in this paper), Dempster’s combination rule, and the concept of evidence weight. Moreover, we illustrate the effectiveness of our new rule by using it to successfully resolve well-known Zadeh’s counter-example, which is against Dempster’s combination rule. Finally, we confirm the advantages of our method over the existing methods through some examples.