On The Validity of Dempster-Shafer Theory

Jean Dezert (1) , Pei Wang (2) , Albena Tchamova (3)

1 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
2 CIS, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
3 IICT BAS - Institute for Information and Communication Technologies

We challenge the validity of Dempster-Shafer The- ory by using an emblematic example to show that DS rule produces counter-intuitive result. Further analysis reveals that the result comes from a understanding of evidence pooling which goes against the common expectation of this process. Although DS theory has attracted some interest of the scientific community working in information fusion and artificial intelligence, its validity to solve practical problems is problematic, because it is not applicable to evidences combination in general, but only to a certain type situations which still need to be clearly identified.

Mots clés: Dempster-Shafer Theory; DST; Mathematical Theory of Evidence; belief functions

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Jean Dezert, Pei Wang, Albena Tchamova. On The Validity of Dempster-Shafer Theory. Fusion 2012 - 15th International Conference on Information Fusion, Jul 2012, Singapour, Singapore. ⟨hal-00720328⟩