A Layered Dempster-Shafer Approach to Scenario Construction and Analysis

The ability to support creation and parallel analysis of competing scenarios is perhaps the greatest single challenge for today's intelligence analysis systems. Dempster-Shafer theory provides an evidentiary reasoning methodology for scenario construction and analysis that offers potential advantages when compared to other approaches such as Bayesian nets as it places less conceptual load on the analyst by not requiring the complete specification of joint probability distributions. This paper presents a method that can further reduce the conceptual load by taking advantage of hierarchically structured indicators. We present a novel interface for this layered, Dempster-Shafer evidentiary reasoning approach and demonstrate the utility of this interface with reference to analysis problems focusing on comparing distinct hypotheses.