A Novel Integration Method for D Numbers Based on Horizontal Comparison

D numbers theory is an extension of Dempster–Shafer evidence theory. It eliminates the constraints of mutual exclusion and completeness under the frame of discernment of Dempster–Shafer evidence theory, so it has been widely used to deal with uncertainty modelling, but if it cannot effectively deal with the problem of missing information, sometimes unreasonable conclusions will be drawn. This paper proposes a new type of integration representation of D numbers, which compares the data of multiple evaluation items horizontally, and can reasonably fill in missing information. We apply this method to the user experience evaluation problem of online live course platform to verify the effectiveness of this method.

Uncertainty modelling and computational aspects of data association

A novel solution to the smoothing problem for multi-object dynamical systems is proposed and evaluated. The systems of interest contain an unknown and varying number of dynamical objects that are partially observed under noisy and corrupted observations. In order to account for the lack of information about the different aspects of this type of complex system, an alternative representation of uncertainty based on possibility theory is considered. It is shown how analogues of usual concepts such as Markov chains and hidden Markov models (HMMs) can be introduced in this context. In particular, the considered statistical model for multiple dynamical objects can be formulated as a hierarchical model consisting of conditionally independent HMMs. This structure is leveraged to propose an efficient method in the context of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) by relying on an approximate solution to the corresponding filtering problem, in a similar fashion to particle MCMC. This approach is shown to outperform existing algorithms in a range of scenarios.