A new combination of evidence based on compromise

Abstract

Dempster rule of combination is the standard way of combining multiple pieces of evidence given by independent sources of information. However, it aroused many controversies about its validity, and many alternatives have been proposed. The paper examines the model of combination in Dempster's original paper and indicates that handling of the independence required among multiple pieces of evidence is strange from the viewpoint of semantics, where the independence among occurrences of multiple pieces of information might be confused with the consistency among contents of the information. The paper then proposes a new model of combination and a new rule of combination called combination by compromise as a consensus generator. The properties of the proposed combination as well as several alternative combination methods proposed so far are discussed in the light of the drawbacks and advantages of Dempster rule. Several numerical examples which demonstrate the properties are also shown. The discussion and the examples suggest that the proposed combination produces the most preferable results among them from the viewpoints of consensus generation.