A Defect in Dempster-Shafer Theory
Artificial Intelligence
2013-02-28 v1
Abstract
By analyzing the relationships among chance, weight of evidence and degree of beliefwe show that the assertion "probability functions are special cases of belief functions" and the assertion "Dempster's rule can be used to combine belief functions based on distinct bodies of evidence" together lead to an inconsistency in Dempster-Shafer theory. To solve this problem, we must reject some fundamental postulates of the theory. We introduce a new approach for uncertainty management that shares many intuitive ideas with D-S theory, while avoiding this problem.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1302.6849,
title = {A Defect in Dempster-Shafer Theory},
author = {Pei Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1302.6849},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
Appears in Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1994)