Combining Evidence Sources in Time Domain With Decision Maker’s Preference on Time Sequence

Bo Zhang,Mingliang Zhang,Yafei Song,Lin Zhang

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2956017

Bo Zhang, Mingliang Zhang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2956017

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Journal: IEEE Access	Publication Date: Jan 1, 2019
Citations: 17	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Air Force Engineering University

Abstract

Given the fusion problem of uncertain information on the time domain, this paper proposes a time-domain evidence fusion method involving the time sequence of the decision-maker based on evidence theory to give full expression to the influence of dynamic features and the time factor of time-domain information fusion on the integration. Time sequence preference of the decision maker is integrated into the time domain evidence fusion. The time sequence preference of the decision-maker is measured by analyzing the features of time domain evidence sequence based on the definition of time sequence memory factor. An optimization model is constructed to solve the time sequence weight. In addition, the concept of the evidence belief degree is combined to amend the evidence source. Finally, the amended evidence is integrated using the Dempster combination rule. Compared with the fusion method without the time factor, numerical results indicate that the evidence fusion method considering the time preference of decision maker can effectively handle the conflict information in the time-domain information sequence, and reasonable fusion results can be obtained. The results of comparative analysis indicate that the proposed method, in which the belief degree of time domain evidence sequence and the subjective preference of decision maker are fully considered, can demonstrate the influence of subjective factors of the decision maker on the time domain evidence fusion and better manifest the dynamic feature of time domain evidence fusion.

Highlights

With the universal description of target information being formed by the multi-source information fusion system integrating the data and knowledge from multiple information sources, multi-source information fusion techniques have been widely used in many fields
This paper develops a method for combing evidence sources in the time domain based on the concept of evidence credibility and time sequence weight, in which the relations between the uncertain information in the evidence source can be demonstrated through the evidence credibility
Evidence combination in time domain is studied in this paper to address the problem of temporal information

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the universal description of target information being formed by the multi-source information fusion system integrating the data and knowledge from multiple information sources, multi-source information fusion techniques have been widely used in many fields. The uncertain information can be effectively integrated at the decision level by Dempster’s rules and the related improvement methods of evidence theory. Wu et al [26] proposed a three-level information fusion framework based on multi-platform multi-radar identification system, which was based on Dempster’s rule and evidence discount operation during time domain fusion, the discount factor was determined based on the interrelations between the time domain evidence. The distinctive feature of time domain evidence fusion is that the order of uncertain information sequences exerts an obvious influence on the fusion results, that is, the influence of the time factor needs to be considered in the process of integration. In terms of features of time-domain evidence sequences, this paper proposes a time-domain evidence fusion method based on the time sequence importance factor.

EVIDENCE THEORY

EVIDENCE CREDIBILITY

TIME SEQUENCE WEIGHT

TEMPORAL EVIDENCE COMBINATION

CONCLUSION