Improved Base Belief Function-Based Conflict Data Fusion Approach Considering Belief Entropy in the Evidence Theory

• Main Authors: Shuang Ni, Yan Lei, Yongchuan Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Entropy
• Subjects: Dempster-Shafer theory; coflict data fusion; improved base belief function; information volume; belief entropy
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/8/801

Due to the nature of the Dempster combination rule, it may produce results contrary to intuition. Therefore, an improved method for conflict evidence fusion is proposed. In this paper, the belief entropy in D–S theory is used to measure the uncertainty in each evidence. First, the initial belief degree is constructed by using an improved base belief function. Then, the information volume of each evidence group is obtained through calculating the belief entropy which can modify the belief degree to get the final evidence that is more reasonable. Using the Dempster combination rule can get the final result after evidence modification, which is helpful to solve the conflict data fusion problems. The rationality and validity of the proposed method are verified by numerical examples and applications of the proposed method in a classification data set.