General combination rules for qualitative and quantitative beliefs

TL;DR

This paper introduces new combination rules for merging both qualitative and quantitative beliefs, enhancing conflict management and specificity considerations in belief fusion.

Contribution

It proposes novel fusion rules capable of handling both qualitative and quantitative beliefs within a unified framework.

Findings

New combination rules for qualitative and quantitative beliefs

Framework effectively manages conflict and specificity

Applicable to expert opinion and natural language beliefs

Abstract

Martin and Osswald \cite{Martin07} have recently proposed many generalizations of combination rules on quantitative beliefs in order to manage the conflict and to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since the experts express themselves usually in natural language with linguistic labels, Smarandache and Dezert \cite{Li07} have introduced a mathematical framework for dealing directly also with qualitative beliefs. In this paper we recall some element of our previous works and propose the new combination rules, developed for the fusion of both qualitative or quantitative beliefs.