Conditioning and updating evidence

A new interpretation of Dempster-Shafer conditional notions based directly, upon the mass assignments is provided. The masses of those propositions that may imply the complement of the conditioning proposition are shown to be completely annulled by the conditioning operation; conditioning may then be construed as a re-distribution of the masses of some of these propositions to those that definitely imply the conditioning proposition. A complete characterization of the propositions whose masses are annulled without re-distribution, annulled with re-distribution and enhanced by the re-distribution of masses is provided. A new evidence updating strategy that is composed of a linear combination of the available evidence and the conditional evidence is also proposed. It enables one to account for the 'integrity' and 'inertia' of the available evidence and its 'flexibility' to updating by appropriate selection of the linear combination weights. Several such strategies, including one that has a probabilistic interpretation, are also provided. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.