SOME QUALITATIVE APPROACHES TO APPLYING THE DEMPSTER-SHAFER THEORY

This paper introduces the idea of using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence with qualitative values. Dempster-Shafer theory is a formalis m for reasoning under uncertainty which may be viewed as a generalisat ion of probability theory with special advantages in its treatment of ambiguous data and the ignorance arising from it. Here I am interested in applying the theory when the numbers that it usually operates over are not universally available. To cope with this lack of numbers, I u se qualitative, semiqualitative, and linguistic values, and apply a fo rm of order of magnitude reasoning.