Qualitative Versus Quantitative Interpretation of the Mathematical Theory of Evidence

Abstract

. The paper presents a novel view of the Dempster-Shafer belief function as a measure of diversity in relational data bases. The Dempster rule of evidence combination corresponds to the join operator of the relational database theory. This rough-set based interpretation is qualitative in nature and can represent a number of belief function operators. Keywords: Soft Computing, Knowledge Representation and Integration, Dempster-Shafer theory, rough set theory, relational databases, qualitative interpretation of Dempster rule. 1 Introduction The Dempster-Shafer Theory or the Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE) [11, 3] shows one of possible ways of application of mathematical probability for subjective evaluation and is intended to be a generalization of bayesian theory of subjective probability [14, 20]. In spite of its numerous interesting formal properties, many attempts to provide a case-based interpretation of MTE failed [17]. Though a tendency to consider belief functions as subj..