An Efficient Dempster-Shafer Evidence Combination Scheme for Uncertainty Handling
Gye-Seong Lee · The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society · 1996
A number of techniques have been studied for handling uncertainty in the development of expert systems. One of techniques adopted in many expert systems is the Dumpster-Shafer Evidence combination scheme. This has been the main focus among others due to is favorable features and computational complexity. In this paper, we develop and algorithm to deal with the exponential complexity inherent in Dempster-Shafer evidence combination. In the evidence combination process, we divide the frame of discernment into two groups, one for those common in both belief functions and the other for the rest. A property is found that in computing new belief function for the latter group, the result of evidence combination show linear change. The irrelevancy factor is derived and used to compute the change. The main idea of the method is to reduce the size of the frame of discernment and thus exponential complexity.