A modified combination rule in generalized evidence theory

Abstract

Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is an efficient tool used in knowledge reasoning and decision-making under uncertain environments. Conflict management is an open issue in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. There is no good practice that can be generally accepted until the presence of generalized evidence theory (GET). GET addresses conflict management in an open world, where the frame of discernment (FOD) is incomplete since uncertainty and lacking knowledge. With the in-depth study, however, the original generalized combination rule (GCR) still has its issue. As an example, based on the original GCR, the system judges whether the FOD is complete or not even though the GBPAs clearly indicate that the proposition is outside of FOD. In this paper, we proposed a modified generalized combination rule (mGCR) in the framework of GET. The mGCR satisfies all properties of GCR in GET, illustrating and modeling the real world more reasonably than the original. Numerical examples demonstrate that mGCR combines GBPAs effectively and has more distinct geometric and physical meaning than the original GCR. Several experiments using real data sets are presented at the end of this paper to evaluate the effectiveness of mGCR.