Cautious Conjunctive Merging of Belief Functions

Sébastien Destercke (1, 2) , Didier Dubois (1) , Eric Chojnacki (2)

1 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
2 IRSN - Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire

When merging belief functions, Dempster rule of combination is justified only when information sources can be considered as independent. When this is not the case, one must find out a cautious merging rule that adds a minimal amount of information to the inputs. Such a rule is said to follow the principle of minimal commitment. Some conditions it should comply with are studied. A cautious merging rule based on maximizing expected cardinality of the resulting belief function is proposed. It recovers the minimum operation when specialized to possibility distributions. This form of the minimal commitment principle is discussed, in particular its discriminating power and its justification when some conflict is present between the belief functions.

Mots clés: belief functions; least commitment; dependence

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Autre [cs.OH]

Sébastien Destercke, Didier Dubois, Eric Chojnacki. Cautious Conjunctive Merging of Belief Functions. 9th European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU 2007), 2007, Hammamet, Tunisia. pp.332-343, ⟨10.1007/978-3-540-75256-1_31⟩. ⟨irsn-00196534⟩