A belief combination rule for a large number of sources

Book excerpt: The theory of belief functions is widely used for data from multiple sources. Different evidence combination rules have been proposed in this framework according to the properties of the sources to combine. However, most of these combination rules are not efficient when there are a large number of sources. This is due to either the complexity or the existence of an absorbing element such as the total conflict mass function for the conjunctive based rules when applied on unreliable evidence. In this paper, based on the assumption that the majority of sources are reliable, a combination rule for a large number of sources is proposed using a simple idea: the more common ideas the sources share, the more reliable these sources are supposed to be.