On the determination of strength of belief for decision support under uncertainty - Part II: fusing strengths of belief
Valuation functions are used in decision making under uncertainty to enable comparisons of alternatives. They are based on a weighted averaging of the n possible payoffs available under an alternative. The weighting vectors used are a reflection of the decision-making agent's strength of belief a given outcome will occur. Our concern is with developing methods to fuse multiple sources of these weighting vectors. We first suggest a method based on a normalized product. Some methods are suggested for handling completely conflicting beliefs. We abstract the basic features of this product fusion method. Particularly notably among these properties is the fact that a source with all weights equal, 1/n, acts as an identity in the fusion process. We consider next a fusion method using a uninorm aggregation operator with identity 1/n. We carefully look at this new type of method for multi-source fusion and suggest some generations and modifications. Finally we consider the situation when the contributing sources have differing credibilities. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
uncertainty decision making uninorms multi-source fusion dempster's rule