Parallel and Sequential Implementations for Combining Belief Functions

Abstract

This paper reports our experiments about parallel and sequential implementations for combining belief functions with an application to a medical diagnostic system. We use as a basis existing methods for combining two belief functions: a direct combination based on Dempster's rule and an indirect combination through Mobius transforms. We further explore various parallel algorithms for combining more than two belief functions, as different belief functions can be combined in any order as long as they are independent of each other. Our results indicate that for the general case, the parallel implementation based on fast Mobius transforms proves to be the most efficient. However, for practical applications where most subsets of a frame of hypotheses have zero probabilities, the parallel implementation based on an improved direct combination rule remains the most efficient.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1992
Accession Number
ADP007126

Entities

People

  • Fei Song
  • Mary Mcleish

Organizations

  • University of Guelph

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Science
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Delphi Method
  • Diseases And Disorders
  • Engineering
  • Expert Systems
  • Hypotheses
  • Information Science
  • Language
  • Liver Diseases
  • Probability
  • Reasoning
  • Statistical Data
  • Statistics

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Programming and Software Development.
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.