Higher Order Fractal Belief Rényi Divergence With Its Applications in Pattern Classification

Information can be quantified and expressed by uncertainty, and improving the decision level of uncertain information is vital in modeling and processing uncertain information. Dempster-Shafer evidence theory can model and process uncertain information effectively. However, the Dempster combination rule may provide counter-intuitive results when dealing with highly conflicting information, leading to a decline in decision level. Thus, measuring conflict is significant in the improvement of decision level. Motivated by this issue, this paper proposes a novel method to measure the discrepancy between bodies of evidence. First, the model of dynamic fractal probability transformation is proposed to effectively obtain more information about the non-specificity of basic belief assignments (BBAs). Then, we propose the higher-order fractal belief Rényi divergence (HOFBReD). HOFBReD can effectively measure the discrepancy between BBAs. Moreover, it is the first belief Rényi divergence that can measure the discrepancy between BBAs with dynamic fractal probability transformation. HoFBReD has several properties in terms of probability transformation as well as measurement. When the dynamic fractal probability transformation ends, HoFBReD is equivalent to measuring the Rényi divergence between the pignistic probability transformations of BBAs. When the BBAs degenerate to the probability distributions, HoFBReD will also degenerate to or be related to several well-known divergences. In addition, based on HoFBReD, a novel multisource information fusion algorithm is proposed. A pattern classification experiment with real-world datasets is presented to compare the proposed algorithm with other methods. The experiment results indicate that the proposed algorithm has a higher average pattern recognition accuracy with all datasets than other methods. The proposed discrepancy measurement method and multisource information algorithm contribute to the improvement of decision level.

Multifractal analysis of mass function

In order to explore the fractal characteristic in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, a fractal dimension of mass function is proposed recently, to reveal the invariance of scale of belief entropy. When mass function degenerates to probability, the fractal dimension is equivalent to classical Renyi information dimension only with α = 1 , which can measure the change rate of Shannon entropy with the size of framework. For Renyi dimension, different parameters α represent the relationship between different entropies and framework size. However, this compatibility is not shown in existing fractal dimension. Thus, in this paper, we introduce parameter α to generalize the existing dimension. Due to the diversity of the value of α , we name the new dimension: multifractal dimension of mass function. In addition, inspired by multifractal spectrum of Cantor set, we explore the relation between the belief degree of focal element and the number of focal element with same belief degree for some special assignments. Relevant results are also presented by spectrum. We provide a static discounting coefficient generating method to modify mass function to improve the accuracy of classify result. The experiment is conducted in three datasets, and the result shows the effectiveness of our method.