A method to determine basic probability assignment in the open world and its application in data fusion and classification

摘要

Under the circumstance of the complete frame of discernment, There are quantities sufficient researches applying the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory (D-S theory) to process uncertain information. However, in most real cases, the frame of discernment is not complete, and the classic evidence theory is not applicable in some degree, including the basic probability assignment (BPA) generation method. In this paper, under the assumption of the open world, the BPA determination issue is focused originally, and a new method based on triangular fuzzy member is proposed to determine BPA. First, the mean value, standard deviation, extreme values as well as the triangular membership function of each attribute can be determined. Then, a nested structure BPA function with an assignment for the null set can be constructed, using the intersection point of one test sample and the models above. Experiments are conducted with the proposed method to determine BPA, through which the classification accuracy rates are computed, analyzed and compared with those generated by other BPA determination methods, which demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method both in the open world and in the closed world.