Fusing Uncertain, Imprecise and Paradoxist Information (DSmT)
Florentín Smarandache, Jean Dezert · 2006
The efficient management and combination of uncertain and conflicting sources of information are of great importance for the development of reliable information fusion systems. Advanced fusion systems have to deal with both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of beliefs expressed by the different sources of information (sensors, expert systems, human reports, etc). This article introduces the theory of plausible and paradoxical reasoning, known as DSmT (DezertSmarandache Theory) in the literature, developed originally for dealing with imprecise, uncertain, and potentially highly conflicting sources of information providing quantitative beliefs on a given set of possible solutions of a given problem. The authors propose here also new ideas on a possible extension of DSmT to the combination of uncertain and conflicting qualitative information in order to deal directly with beliefs expressed with linguistic labels instead of numerical values so as to get closer to the nature of the information expressed in natural language and available directly from human experts.