A Comparison of Plausibility Conflict and of Conflict Based on Amount of Uncertainty of Belief Functions

When combining belief functions by conjunctive rules of combination, conflicts often appear, which are assigned to ∅ by un-normalized conjunctive rule ∩ ⃝ or normalized by Dempster’s rule of combination ⊕ in Dempster-Shafer theory. Combination of conflicting belief functions and interpretation of conflicts is often questionable in real applications, thus a series of alternative combination rules was suggested and a series of papers on conflicting belief functions was published. This theoretical contribution presents one of the perspective recent approaches — authors’s plausibility conflict — and Harmanec’s approach which is, unfortunately, aside the recent interest: conflict based on uncertainty measure and Dempster’s rule. Both the approaches are analysed and compared here. As the approaches are based on completely different assumptions, some of their properties are very different almost counter-intuitive for the first view; on the other hand, the approaches have some analogous properties, which differs both of them from the other commonly used approaches to conflict between belief functions.