On the evidence inference theory

The Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence reasoning (D-S theory) has been widely discussed and used recently, because it is a reasonable, convenient, and promising method to combine uncertain information from disparate sources with different levels of abstraction. On the other hand, the D-S theory has sparked considerable debate among statisticians and knowledge engineers. The theory has been criticized and debated upon its behavior and attributes, such as high computational complexity, evidence independency requirement in its combination rule, etc. some principal problems of the D-S theory are discussed in the paper. The relationship of the D-S theory and the classical probability theory is analyzed first, and then a generalized evidence combination formula relaxing the requirement of evidence independency is presented, which makes the D-S theory more realistic to applications.