An Improved Dempster-Shafer Algorithm Using a Partial Conflict Measurement

Abstract

Multiple evidences based decision making is an important functionality for computers and robots. To combine multiple evidences, mathematical theory of evidence has been developed, and it involves the most vital part called Dempster’s rule of combination. The rule is used for combining multiple evidences. However, the combined result gives a counterintuitive conclusion when highly conflicting evidences exist. In particular, when we obtain two different sources of evidence for a single hypothesis, only one of the sources may contain evidence. In this paper, we introduce a modified combination rule based on the partial conflict measurement by using an absolute difference between two evidences’ basic probability numbers. The basic probability number is described in details in Section 2 “Mathematical Theory of Evidence”. As a result, the proposed combination rule outperforms Dempster’s rule of combination. More precisely, the modified combination rule provides a reasonable conclusion when combining highly conflicting evidences and shows similar results with Dempster’s rule of combination in the case of the both sources of evidence are not conflicting. In addition, when obtained evidences contain multiple hypotheses, our proposed combination rule shows more logically acceptable results in compared with the results of Dempster’s rule.