Classic Works Of The Dempster Shafer Theory Of Belief Functions

This is a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. The book is the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The book includes a foreword reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Belief Functions, BELIEF 2016, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2016. The 25 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 33 submissions. The papers describe recent developments of theoretical issues and applications in various areas such as combination rules; conflict management; generalized information theory; image processing; material sciences; navigation.

The theory of belief functions, also known as evidence theory or Dempster-Shafer theory, was first introduced by Arthur P. Dempster in the context of statistical inference, and was later developed by Glenn Shafer as a general framework for modeling epistemic uncertainty. These early contributions have been the starting points of many important developments, including the Transferable Belief Model and the Theory of Hints. The theory of belief functions is now well established as a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, and has well understood connections to other frameworks such as probability, possibility and imprecise probability theories. This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Belief Functions that was held in Compiègne, France on 9-11 May 2012. It gathers 51 contributions describing recent developments both on theoretical issues (including approximation methods, combination rules, continuous belief functions, graphical models and independence concepts) and applications in various areas including classification, image processing, statistics and intelligent vehicles.

Dempster-Shafer evidence theory has been widely used in various applications. However, to solve the problem of counter-intuitive outcomes by using classical Dempster-Shafer combination rule is still an open issue while fusing the conflicting evidences. Many approaches based on discounted evidence and weighted average evidence have been investigated and have made significant improvements

This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 (available at fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book4.pdf or www.onera.fr/sites/default/files/297/2015-DSmT-Book4.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well. We want to thank all the contributors of this fifth volume for their research works and their interests in the development of DSmT, and the belief functions. We are grateful as well to other colleagues for encouraging us to edit this fifth volume, and for sharing with us several ideas and for their questions and comments on DSmT through the years. We thank the International Society of Information Fusion (www.isif.org) for diffusing main research works related to information fusion (including DSmT) in the international fusion conferences series over the years. Florentin Smarandache is grateful to The University of New Mexico, U.S.A., that many times partially sponsored him to attend international conferences, workshops and seminars on Information Fusion. Jean Dezert is grateful to the Department of Information Processing and Systems (DTIS) of the French Aerospace Lab (Office National d’E´tudes et de Recherches Ae´rospatiales), Palaiseau, France, for encouraging him to carry on this research and for its financial support. Albena Tchamova is first of all grateful to Dr. Jean Dezert for the opportunity to be involved during more than 20 years to follow and share his smart and beautiful visions and ideas in the development of the powerful Dezert-Smarandache Theory for data fusion. She is also grateful to the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, for sponsoring her to attend international conferences on Information Fusion.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Belief Functions, BELIEF 2021, held in Shanghai, China, in October 2021. The 30 full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 37 submissions. The papers cover a wide range on theoretical aspects on mathematical foundations, statistical inference as well as on applications in various areas including classification, clustering, data fusion, image processing, and much more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Belief Functions, BELIEF 2022, held in Paris, France, in October 2022. The theory of belief functions is now well established as a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, and has well-understood connections to other frameworks such as probability, possibility, and imprecise probability theories. It has been applied in diverse areas such as machine learning, information fusion, and pattern recognition. The 29 full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 31 submissions. The papers cover a wide range on theoretical aspects on mathematical foundations, statistical inference as well as on applications in various areas including classification, clustering, data fusion, image processing, and much more.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Belief Functions, BELIEF 2018, held in Compiègne, France, in September 2018.The 33 revised regular papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 73 submissions. The papers were solicited on theoretical aspects (including for example statistical inference, mathematical foundations, continuous belief functions) as well as on applications in various areas including classification, statistics, data fusion, network analysis and intelligent vehicles.