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A novel combination rule for conflict management in data fusion

  • Fuzzy systems and their mathematics
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Abstract

How to handle conflict in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is an open issue. Many approaches have been proposed to solve this problem. The existing approaches can be divided into two kinds. The first is to improve the combination rule, and the second is to modify the data model. A typical method to improve combination rule is to assign the conflict to the total ignorance set \(\varTheta \). However, it does not make full use of conflict information. A novel combination rule is proposed in this paper, which assigns the conflicting mass to the power set (ACTP). Compared with modifying data model, the advantage of the proposed method is the sequential fusion, which greatly decrease computational complexity. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method, some numerical examples are given. Due to the less information loss, the proposed method is better than other methods in terms of identifying the correct evidence, the speed of convergence and computational complexity.

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Availability of data and materials

All data and materials generated or analysed during this study are included in this article.

Code availability

The code of the current study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61973332), JSPS Invitational Fellowships for Research in Japan (Short-term).

Funding

The work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61973332).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Engineer, Kunming University, Kunming, China

    Xingyuan Chen

  2. Key Laboratory of Data Governance and Intelligent Decision in Universities of Yunnan, Kunming, China

    Xingyuan Chen

  3. Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Yong Deng

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  1. Xingyuan Chen
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors performed material preparation, data collection and analysis. Xingyuan chen wrote the first draft of the paper. All authors contributed to the revisions of the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yong Deng.

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Chen, X., Deng, Y. A novel combination rule for conflict management in data fusion. Soft Comput 27, 16483–16492 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-023-09112-w

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