An Improved Weighted Averaging Method for Evidence Fusion

Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering book series (LNEE, volume 236)

Abstract

D-S evidence theory is an important mathematical tool for uncertainty reasoning. However, it may lead to counterintuitive conclusions when combining conflicting evidences. In order to overcome this disadvantage, one can modify the evidences before Dempster’s rule of combination. One representative method is to assign a weight to each evidence according to its credibility degree based on the concept of distance (or similarity) between two evidences. This method can gain more robust fusion results than many other known methods. However, it may fail to correctly converge according to the cardinality of the sets in the evidence. When evidence conflicts with other evidences, the evidence may lose impact on the combination result. Moreover, the combined mass is nonmonotonic even though evidence varies monotonically. Therefore, the method still leads to counterintuitive or confusing results. This paper brings forward an improved weighted averaging method involving a new similarity measure between evidences and a new combination rule. The numerical examples show the proposed method well solves the above problems.

Keywords

Data fusion Evidence theory Conflicting evidence Combination rule Evidence distance Evidence similarity 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (61074087), Innovation Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission of China (12ZZ144), and Innovation Ability Construction Project for Teachers of School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering of University of Shanghai Science and Technology (GDCX-Y1111).

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of Optical-Electrical and Computer EngineeringUniversity of Shanghai for Science and TechnologyShanghaiChina
  2. 2.Department of Electronics and Information SystemsAkita Prefectural UniversityAkitaJapan

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