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Combining dependent bodies of evidence

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Abstract

Dempster’s combination rule can only be applied to independent bodies of evidence. One occurrence of dependence between two bodies of evidence is when they result from a common source. This paper proposes an improved method for combining dependent bodies of evidence which takes the significance of the common information sources into consideration. The method is based on the significance weighting operation and the “decombination” operation. A numerical example is illustrated to show the use and effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant No. 61503237, Grant No. 61174022, Grant No. 51107080, Chongqing Natural Science Foundation (for Distinguished Young Scholars), Grant No. CSCT, 2010BA2003, General Motors R & D at Vanderbilt University (Project No. ND0044200), and Joint PhD Student Scholarship of SJTU, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Power Station Automation Technology (No.13DZ2273800).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation Engineering, Shanghai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, 200090, China

    Xiaoyan Su & Wenhua Han

  2. School of Engineering, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Sankaran Mahadevan

  3. School of Computer and Information Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China

    Yong Deng

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  1. Xiaoyan Su
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  2. Sankaran Mahadevan
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  3. Wenhua Han
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  4. Yong Deng
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Correspondence to Xiaoyan Su.

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Su, X., Mahadevan, S., Han, W. et al. Combining dependent bodies of evidence. Appl Intell 44, 634–644 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-015-0723-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-015-0723-5

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