Abstract
Dempster's rule of combination is the standard way of combining multiple pieces of evidence given by independent sources of information. However, it aroused controversy about the validity and many alternative combinations were proposed.The paper examines the model of combination discussed in the original paper, and indicates that the mathematical model is somewhat strange from the viewpoint of semantics. It might confuse the independence among information sources with the independence among bodies of evidence. The paper proposes a new model of combination. It introduces multiple belief spaces to represent multiple bodies of evidence, each of which is given by the independent sources of information. The bodies of evidence in the different belief spaces could be combined into another belief space possibly in three ways; by exclusion, by union and by compromise. Among them, the paper proposes the last one, combination by compromise. The combination was evaluated with some numerical examples that show the drawback and advantage of the Dempster's rule. The results show that the proposed is one of the most preferable combinations among alternatives.
