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Sensitivity of combination schemes under conflicting conditions and a new method

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 991))

Abstract

In the theory of evidential reasoning, Dempster's rule is used for combining belief functions based on independent evidences. There has been a lot of debate over the counter-intuitive nature of results obtained by this rule [4, 8, 14, 15]. Dubois and Prade [1, 3] have shown that Dempster's rule is not robust and is sensitive to inaccurate estimates of uncertainty values. Many authors have suggested modifications which overcome this drawback.

In this paper, we first bring out the limitation of the combination rule introduced by Zhang [16]. Subsequently, we focus our study on two other rules. The first one was proposed by Dubois and Prade [2, 3] and is known as Disjunctive rule of combination. Incidentally, this rule also appeared in the Hau and Kashyap's work [5]. The other combination rule was due to Yager [13]. Even though these rules are robust, we show that in some cases these rules treat evidences asymmetrically and give counterintuitive results. We then propose a combination rule which doesn't have these drawback. An intuitive justification for this rule is also provided.

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References

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Jacques Wainer Ariadne Carvalho

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© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Joshi, A.V., Sahasrabudhe, S.C., Shankar, K. (1995). Sensitivity of combination schemes under conflicting conditions and a new method. In: Wainer, J., Carvalho, A. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. SBIA 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 991. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034797

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034797

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60436-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47467-8

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