A Belief Coulomb Force in D-S Evidence Theory

Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory is regarded as an effective method of dealing with the uncertainty of the information but still suffers from the conflict problem among the evidence. Despite that various techniques were presented in plenty of publications, currently, there is no convincing evidence and firm conclusion about the optimum solution. This study presents Belief Coulomb Force (BCF) into D-S evidence theory, where Zhou
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entropy is applied to represent the electrical charge of the belief function, and the Coulomb gravity or repulsion would be identified with the Pearson correlation coefficient. According to the simulation results, the recognition accuracy on malfunction diagnosis of the presented approach reaches 93.7%, and the effectiveness of analyzing the conflict evidence problem can be demonstrated from the comparison with the previous methods.