On the Dempster-Shafer framework and new combination rules
Information Sciences: an International Journal
The Combination of Evidence in the Transferable Belief Model
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
On the justification of Dempster's rule of combination
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Artificial Intelligence
Two views of belief: belief as generalized probability and belief as evidence
Artificial Intelligence
Combining belief functions when evidence conflicts
Decision Support Systems
Uncertain Information Processing in Expert Systems
Uncertain Information Processing in Expert Systems
Probabilistic logic under uncertainty
CATS '07 Proceedings of the thirteenth Australasian symposium on Theory of computing - Volume 65
Interpreting Belief Functions as Dirichlet Distributions
ECSQARU '07 Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty
Cumulative and averaging fusion of beliefs
Information Fusion
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Dempster’s rule is traditionally interpreted as an operator for fusing belief functions. While there are different types of belief fusion, there has been considerable confusion regarding the exact type of operation that Dempster’s rule performs. Many alternative operators for belief fusion have been proposed, where some are based on the same fundamental principle as Dempster’s rule, and others have a totally different basis, such as the cumulative and averaging fusion operators. In this article, we analyze Dempster’s rule from a statistical and frequentist perspective and compare it with cumulative and averaging belief fusion. We prove, and illustrate by examples on colored balls, that Dempster’s rule in fact represents a method for serial combination of stochastic constraints. Consequently, Dempster’s rule is not a method for cumulative fusion of belief functions under the assumption that subjective beliefs are an extension of frequentist beliefs. Having identified the true nature of Dempster’s rule, appropriate applications of Dempster’s rule of combination are described such as the multiplication of orthogonal belief functions, and the combination of preferences dictated by different parties. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.