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A new rule to combine dependent bodies of evidence

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Abstract

Dempster’s rule of combination can only be applied to independent bodies of evidence. This paper proposes a new rule to combine dependent bodies of evidence. The rule is based on the concept of joint belief distribution, and can be seen as a generalization of Dempster’s rule. When the bodies of evidence are independent, the new combination rule will be reduced into Dempster’s rule. Two examples are illustrated to show the use and effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors greatly appreciate the reviewers’ suggestions and the editor’s encouragement. This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, (Grant Nos. 61503237, 61573290), “Chenguang Program” supported by Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, Shanghai Science and Technology Committee Key Program (Grant Nos. 18020500900, 15160500800), Shanghai Key Laboratory of Power Station Automation Technology (No. 13DZ2273800), Shanghai Education Commission Excellent Youth Project (No. ZZsdl15144).

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Xiaoyan Su, Lusu Li & Hong Qian

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

    Sankaran Mahadevan

  3. Department of Biostatistics, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37235, USA

    Yong Deng

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  1. Xiaoyan Su
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  2. Lusu Li
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  3. Hong Qian
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  4. Sankaran Mahadevan
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  5. Yong Deng
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Correspondence to Xiaoyan Su.

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Communicated by A. Di Nola.

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Su, X., Li, L., Qian, H. et al. A new rule to combine dependent bodies of evidence. Soft Comput 23, 9793–9799 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-019-03804-y

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