Revision rules in the Theory of Evidence

Jianbing Ma (1) , Weiru Liu (1) , Didier Dubois (2, 3) , Henri Prade (2, 3)

1 School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
2 IRIT-ADRIA - Argumentation, Décision, Raisonnement, Incertitude et Apprentissage
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Combination rules proposed so far in the Dempster- Shafer theory of evidence, especially Dempster rule, rely on a basic assumption, that is, pieces of evidence being combined are considered to be on a par, i.e. play the same role. When a source of evidence is less reliable than another, it is possible to discount it and then a symmetric combination operation is still used. In the case of revision, the idea is to let prior knowledge of an agent be altered by some input information. The change problem is thus intrinsically asymmetric. Assuming the input information is reliable, it should be retained whilst the prior information should be changed minimally to that effect. Although belief revision is already an important subfield of artificial intelligence, so far, it has been little addressed in evidence theory. In this paper, we define the notion of revision for the theory of evidence and propose several different revision rules, called the inner and outer revisions, and a modified adaptive outer revision, which better corresponds to the idea of revision. Properties of these revision rules are also investigated.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Jianbing Ma, Weiru Liu, Didier Dubois, Henri Prade. Revision rules in the Theory of Evidence. 22nd IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, Oct 2010, Arras, France. pp.295--302. ⟨hal-03349431⟩