On the relationship between evidential structures and data tables

Abstract

In this paper, we would like to investigate the relationship between evidential structures (ES)—the basic qualitative structures of Dempster-Shafer theory, and the data table based knowledge representation systems(KRS) subject to rough set analysis. It is shown that an ES has a natural representation as a data table and from a given data table and two of its attributes, an ES can be extracted. We also show that some important operations on ES’s can be realized in relational algebra. The results are then generalized to the fuzzy case. Consequentially, we further clarify the connection between evidence theory and rough set theory. Keywords: Knowledge representation, rough set, Dempster-Shafer theory, evidential structures, data tables