The Method of Assigning Incidences

摘要

Incidence calculus is a probabilistic logic in which incidences, standing for the situations in which formulae may be true, are assigned to some formulae, and probabilities are assigned to incidences. However, numerical values may be assigned to formulae directly without specifying the incidences. In this paper, we propose a method of discovering incidences under these circumstances which produces a unique output comparing with the large number of outputs from other approaches. Some theoretical aspects of this method are thoroughly studied and the completeness of the result generated from it is proved. The result can be used to calculate mass functions from belief functions in the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence (DS theory) and define probability spaces from inner measures (or lower bounds) of probabilities on the relevant propositional language set.