An improved belief entropy and its application in decision-making

Abstract

Uncertainty measure in data fusion applications is a hot topic; quite a few methods have been proposed to measure the degree of uncertainty in Dempster-Shafer framework. However, the existing methods pay little attention to the scale of the frame of discernment (FOD), which means a loss of information. Due to this reason, the existing methods cannot measure the difference of uncertain degree among different FODs. In this paper, an improved belief entropy is proposed in Dempster-Shafer framework. The proposed belief entropy takes into consideration more available information in the body of evidence (BOE), including the uncertain information modeled by the mass function, the cardinality of the proposition, and the scale of the FOD. The improved belief entropy is a newmethod for uncertainty measure inDempster-Shafer framework. Based on the newbelief entropy, a decisionmaking approach is designed. The validity of the new belief entropy is verified according to some numerical examples and the proposed decision-making approach.