An Alternative Combination Rule for Evidential Reasoning

Abstract

With an aim of having a normal behavior in combination of bodies of evidence, this paper proposes a new combination rule which includes the cardinality of focal set elements in conjunctive operation and the conflict redistribution to all meaningful sets steps. This distribution is based on factors, which are computed by weighting the masses assigned to each set by the sources of information and those obtained by the conjunctive operation with its cardinality. This strategy forces the conflict redistribution in favor of the more committed hypothesis. Our method is evaluated and compared with some numerical examples reported in the literature. As result, this rule redistributes the conflict in favor of the more committed hypothesis and gives intuitive interpretation for combining multiple information sources with coherent results