On a Global Measure of Information in Dempster and Shafer's Theory

Abstract

Two types of ambiguity are recognizable in Dempster and Shafer's theory of evidence. One is the ambiguity of the system itself and the other is the ambiguity of human knowledge or information about the system. In this paper, from this point of view, the property for measuring the ambiguity of the system and the property for measuring the ambiguity of human knowledge or information are discussed. A global measure of information which satisfies both of these properties is proposed. The unicity of the, proposed measure is proved when it must be an extension of Shannon entropy. The soundness of this measure of information is confirmed by a simple experiment.