A generalized evidence conflict measure

摘要

A proper conflict measure is the premise of handling the conflict between pieces of evidence properly. All the existing conflict measures do not consider the potential conflict, which cannot be neglected in many cases. After analyzing the potential conflict that was proposed qualitatively by Daniel [15], this paper first defines the local potential conflict quantitatively. The local conflicting mass is the special case of local potential conflict. Then the concept of generalized evidence conflict is proposed. The generalized evidence conflict is the sum of all the local potential conflicts and the local conflicting masses. Generalized evidence conflict is more comprehensive and can measure the conflict among more than two pieces of evidence. When there is no potential conflict, it becomes the same as Shafer's conflicting mass. Numerical simulations demonstrate this measure's rationality.