Unified Description and Extension of Combination Rules in Evidence Reasoning Based on the Random Set Method

摘要

The most popular rule of evidence combination, called Dempster's combination rule, has been widely used since it is a simple and convenient mechanism for combining multisource information. However,it has restrictive requirements and sometimes gives some counterintuitive results. With the desire to over-come its inherent limitations, many attempts have been made,alternative rules to the Dempster's combination rule can be found in the existing literature, but almost each of them can only be applied to some specific case. So it is very necessary to search their common foundation so as to create more new rules for combining available multisource information in more cases. In this paper, a unified formulation to describe most classical combination rules is presented based on the random set theory, and what's more, it provides us with new ideas for constructing other applicable combination rules.Finally, by use of this formulation, a new combination rule is constructed for overcoming some counterintuitive phenomena.