Belief functions on MV-algebras of fuzzy sets: An overview

Abstract

Belief functions are the measure theoretical objects Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is based on. They are in fact totally monotone capacities, and can be regarded as a special class of measures of uncertainty used to model an agent's degrees of belief in the occurrence of a set of events by taking into account different bodies of evidence that support those beliefs. In this chapter we present two main approaches to extending belief functions on Boolean algebras of events to MV-algebras of events, modelled as fuzzy sets, and we discuss several properties of these generalized measures. In particular we deal with the normalization and soft-normalization problems, and on a generalization of Dempster's rule of combination. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.