Discounting and Combination Operations in Evidential Reasoning
This work addresses foundational issues in evidential reasoning for AI, but it appears incremental as it focuses on specific operational properties.
The paper investigates the non-commutativity between discount and orthogonal sum operations in evidential reasoning, deriving expressions for these operations applied to evidential functions.
Evidential reasoning is now a leading topic in Artificial Intelligence. Evidence is represented by a variety of evidential functions. Evidential reasoning is carried out by certain kinds of fundamental operation on these functions. This paper discusses two of the basic operations on evidential functions, the discount operation and the well-known orthogonal sum operation. We show that the discount operation is not commutative with the orthogonal sum operation, and derive expressions for the two operations applied to the various evidential function.