A Comparison of Plausibility Conflict and of Degree of Conflict Based on Amount of Uncertainty of Belief Functions

Abstract

When combining belief functions by conjunctive rules of combination, conflicts often appear. Combination of conflicting belief functions and interpretation of conflicts is often questionable in real applications, thus a series of alternative combination rules was suggested and a series of papers on conflicting belief functions published in last years. This theoretical contribution presents one of the perspective recent approaches - author’s plausibility conflict - and Harmanec’s approach which stands, unfortunately, aside the recent interest: conflict based on uncertainty measure and Dempster’s rule. Both the approaches are analysed and compared here. The compared approaches are based on completely different assumptions, thus some of their properties are very different almost counterintuitive when first look at; on the other hand, they have some analogous properties, which distinguish them from other commonly used approaches to conflict between belief functions.