Combining belief functions when evidence conflicts

Abstract The use of belief functions to represent and to manipulate uncertainty in expert systems has been advocated by some practitioners and researchers. Others have provided examples of counter-intuitive results produced by Dempster's rule for combining belief functions and have proposed several alternatives to this rule. This paper presents another problem, the failure to balance multiple evidence, then illustrates the proposed solutions and describes their limitations. Of the proposed methods, averaging best solves the normalization problems, but it does not offer convergence toward certainty, nor a probabilistic basis. To achieve convergence, this research suggests incorporating average belief into the combining rule.