Shedding new light on Zadeh's criticism of Dempster's rule of combination
Rolf Haenni · 2005
Shortly after proposing Dempster's rule of combination as a general aggregation rule for evidence from independent sources, Zadeh formulated an annoying example for which Dempster's rule seemed to produce counter-intuitive results. Since then, many authors have used Zadeh's example either to criticize Demster-Shafer theory as a whole, or as a motivation for constructing alternative combination rules. This paper shows that the counter-intuition of Zadeh's example is not a problem of Dempster's rule, but a problem of Zadeh's model that does not correspond to reality. Two different ways to fix the problem will be discussed, showing that Dempster's rule of combination perfectly behaves, as one would expect.