Belief revision and information fusion on optimum entropy: Research Articles

This article presents new methods for probabilistic belief revision and information fusion. By making use of the information theoretical principles of optimum entropy (ME principles), we define a generalized revision operator that aims at simulating the human learning of lessons, and we introduce a fusion operator that handles probabilistic information faithfully. This ME-fusion operator satisfies basic demands, such as commutativity and the Pareto principle. A detailed analysis shows it to merge the corresponding epistemic states. Furthermore, it induces a numerical fusion operator that computes the information theoretical mean of probabilities. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 19: 837–857, 2004.