Combining sources of evidence with reliability and importance for decision making

The combination of sources of evidence with reliability has been widely studied within the framework of Dempster-Shafer theory (DST), which has been employed as a major method for integrating multiple sources of evidence with uncertainty. By the fact that sources of evidence may also be different in importance, for example in multi-attribute decision making (MADM), we propose the importance discounting and combination method within the framework of DST to combine sources of evidence with importance, which is composed of an importance discounting operation and an extended Dempster’s rule of combination. Three evidence combination axioms are proposed and explored to uncover the differences between reliability and importance in evidence reasoning. Furthermore, a general scheme is proposed for combination of sources of evidence with both reliability and importance. An example of car performance evaluation is studied to show the efficiency of the new general scheme.