Open AccessA Simple View of the Dempster‐Shafer Theory of Evidence and its Implication for the Rule of Combination
Author(s) -
Zadeh Lotfi A.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
ai magazine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.597
H-Index - 79
eISSN - 2371-9621
pISSN - 0738-4602
DOI - 10.1609/aimag.v7i2.542
Subject(s) - dempster–shafer theory , simple (philosophy) , computer science , context (archaeology) , artificial intelligence , epistemology , geography , philosophy , archaeology
During the past two years, the Dempster‐Shafer theory of evidence has attracted considerable attention within the AI community as a promising method of dealing with uncertainty in expert systems. As presented in the literature, the theory is hard to master. In a simple approach that is outlined in this paper, the Dempster‐Shafer theory is viewed in the context of relational databases as the application of familiar retrieval techniques to second‐order relations, that is, relations in which the data entries are relations in first normal form. The relational viewpoint clarifies some of the controversial issues in the Dempster‐Shafer theory and facilitates its use in AI‐oriented applications.