A Novel Measure of Uncertainty in the Dempster-Shafer Theory

Abstract

In the Dempster-Shafer theory, how to quantitatively evaluate the quality of information is an essential issue and also an open issue. Many of measures of uncertainty have been proposed in previous work, whereas some measures among them had been proved to have a few shortcomings. The validity and rationality of the measures proposed in recent years have been explored and analyzed preliminarily, and then an empirical measure of uncertainty with exponential function form which is directly based on the framework of the evidence theory is proposed to overcome the shortcomings. Several numerical examples have been presented to illustrate the validity and rationality of the empirical measure.

Keywords

• The Dempster-Shafer theory
• measure of uncertainty
• exponential function
• validity and rationality