Basic concepts, definitions, and methods in D number theory

TL;DR

This paper systematically develops the theoretical foundations of D number theory, extending previous work by defining non-exclusiveness, proposing a combination rule, and introducing belief and plausibility measures for uncertain, incomplete information.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, formal framework for D number theory, addressing key issues like non-exclusiveness and information incompleteness with new definitions and combination methods.

Findings

Formal definition of non-exclusiveness in DNT

Proposed an extended combination rule for multiple D numbers

Defined belief and plausibility measures satisfying desirable properties

Abstract

As a generalization of Dempster-Shafer theory, D number theory (DNT) aims to provide a framework to deal with uncertain information with non-exclusiveness and incompleteness. Although there are some advances on DNT in previous studies, however, they lack of systematicness, and many important issues have not yet been solved. In this paper, several crucial aspects in constructing a perfect and systematic framework of DNT are considered. At first the non-exclusiveness in DNT is formally defined and discussed. Secondly, a method to combine multiple D numbers is proposed by extending previous exclusive conflict redistribution (ECR) rule. Thirdly, a new pair of belief and plausibility measures for D numbers are defined and many desirable properties are satisfied by the proposed measures. Fourthly, the combination of information-incomplete D numbers is studied specially to show how to deal with the incompleteness of information in DNT. In this paper, we mainly give relative math definitions, properties, and theorems, concrete examples and applications will be considered in the future study.