A Defect in Dempster-Shafer Theory
This addresses a foundational flaw in a widely used uncertainty theory, which is significant for researchers and practitioners in AI and decision-making.
The paper identifies an inconsistency in Dempster-Shafer theory arising from two key assertions, and proposes a new uncertainty management approach to resolve it while retaining intuitive ideas from the theory.
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.