On Kenn's Rule of Combination Applied to Breast Cancer Precision Therapy
This is an incremental critique that highlights a serious technical error, potentially affecting researchers and practitioners relying on KRC for decision-making in medical applications.
The authors identified a flaw in Kenn's rule of combination (KRC), proving it is not associative, which means the method's results depend arbitrarily on the order of fusion, undermining its reliability for breast cancer precision therapy.
This short technical note points out an erroneous claim about a new rule of combination of basic belief assignments presented recently by Kenn et al. in 2023, referred as Kenn's rule of combination (or just as KRC for short). We prove thanks a very simple counter-example that Kenn's rule is not associative. Consequently, the results of the method proposed by Kenn et al. highly depends on the ad-hoc sequential order chosen for the fusion process as proposed by the authors. This serious problem casts in doubt the interest of this method and its real ability to provide trustful results and to make good decisions to help for precise breast cancer therapy.