ON THE EVIDENCE INFERENCE THEORY

The Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence reasoning (D-S theory) has been widely discussed and used recently, because it is a reasonable, conve nient, and promising method to combine uncertain information from disp arate sources with different levels of abstraction. On the other hand, the D-S theory has sparked considerable debate among statisticians an d knowledge engineers. The theory has been criticized and debated upon its behavior and attributes, such as high computational complexity, e vidence independency requirement in its combination rule, etc. some pr incipal problems of the D-S theory are discussed in the paper. The rel ationship of the D-S theory and the classical probability theory is an alyzed first, and then a generalized evidence combination formula rela xing the requirement of evidence independency is presented, which make s the D-S theory more realistic to applications.