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Combining Conflicting Evidence by Constructing Evidence’s Angle-Distance Ordered Weighted Averaging Pairs

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Abstract

The fusion of highly conflicting evidence in the Dempster–Shafer evidence theory has been an important research topic. To solve this issue, many existing methods depicted the conflicts between evidence by various distance measures. Although the distances between evidence can reflect the conflicts of evidence to some extent, they only represent one aspect of the conflicts. In this study, we propose a new conflict measurement method based on both the distance and angle between evidence. To combine the evidence distance and evidence angle effectively, the angle–distance ordered weighted averaging (OWA) pair is constructed inspired by the induced ordered weighted averaging operator. In addition, the personalized quantifier is used to describe decision-makers’ individual attitudes and risk preferences. The original evidence is modified by using the ordered weight of each evidence to obtain the discount evidence. A numerical example and corresponding comparative analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed method in measuring the conflict between evidence.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71971145, 71771156).

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  1. Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, China

    Zhongyuan Ren & Huchang Liao

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  1. Zhongyuan Ren
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  2. Huchang Liao
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Correspondence to Huchang Liao.

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Ren, Z., Liao, H. Combining Conflicting Evidence by Constructing Evidence’s Angle-Distance Ordered Weighted Averaging Pairs. Int. J. Fuzzy Syst. 23, 494–505 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-020-00964-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-020-00964-0

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