Context-based information quality for sequential decision making

The context-dependent nature of information quality has been well recognized in the literature. Depending on the context, the overall information quality may relate to a single quality attribute, a combination of several, or all the attributes. Selection of quality attributes, methods for their combination as well as quality control strategies require consideration of decision makers´ objectives and functions together with context parameters such as characteristics of the environment and current situations. This paper considers such context-dependent information quality attributes, namely, credibility, reliability, and timeliness, and presents a method of incorporating their combination into sequential decision making for pattern recognition. The context is represented by the time-dependent distance between an observed target and a sensor, and a situation-based time-dependent threshold on credibility. A case study involving an evidential learning system for sequential decision making designed for a quantitative evaluation of the described method, is also presented.