A Consistency-Specificity Trade-Off to Select Source Behavior in Information Fusion

Combining pieces of information provided by several sources without or with little prior knowledge about the behavior of the sources is an old yet still important and rather open problem in the belief function theory. In this paper, we propose an approach to select the behavior of sources based on a very general and expressive fusion scheme, that has the important advantage of making clear the assumptions made about the sources. The selection process itself relies on two cornerstones that are the notions of specificity and consistency of a knowledge representation, and that we adapt to the considered fusion scheme. We illustrate our proposal on different examples and show that the proposed approach actually encompasses some important existing fusion strategies.