This paper uses decision-theoretic principles to obtain new insights into the assessment and updating of probabilities. First, a new foundation of Bayesianism is given. It does not require infinite atomless uncertainties as did Savage's classical result, and can therefore be applied to any finite Bayesian network. It neither requires linear utility as did de Finetti 's classical result, and the...

It finally happened to me: I was sued for malpractice by the family of a patient who had died suddenly. My inner turmoil in the aftermath of this traumatic event affected me deeply. While I was an experienced family doctor dedicated to patient-centered medicine, the event challenged my customary approach to my patients. I share three vignettes from my practice that describe my inner dialogue bo...

In an interesting Turkish retrospective study, conducted between 2012 and 2015, involving 1510 adults, Kekilli et al.[1] tested triple therapy (lansoprazole 30 mg b.i.d., clarithromycin 500 mg b.i.d., and amoxicillin 1 g b.i.d.), bismuth group C (lansoprazole, clarithromycin, amoxicillin, and bismuth subsalicylate 524 mg b.i.d.), and bismuth group M (lansoprazole, amoxicillin, metronidazole 500...

Software Quality and Reliability Prediction Using Dempster-Shafer Theory

The drawbacks of pure probabilistic methods and of the certainty factor model have led us in recent years to consider alternate approaches. Particularly appealing is the mathematical theory of evidence developed by Arthur Dempster. We are convinced it merits careful study and interpretation in the context of expert systems. This theory was first set forth by Dempster in the 1960s and subsequent...

detection of brain tissues using magnetic resonance imaging (mri) is an active and challenging research area in computational neuroscience. brain mri artifacts lead to an uncertainty in pixel values. therefore, brain mri segmentation is a complicated concern which is tackled by a novel data fusion approach. the proposed algorithm has two main steps. in the first step the brain mri is divided to...

How to manage conflict is still an open issue in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. The correlation coefficient can be used to measure the similarity of evidence in Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. However, existing correlation coefficients of belief functions have some shortcomings. In this paper, a new correlation coefficient is proposed with many desirable properties. One of its applications i...

In this paper, speaker identification using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence is discussed. The objective is to use the complementary information present from different classifiers to fuse the classification results into a single decision. Here, we use a decreasing function of the distance (of the classifiers) as our belief function. In the case of speaker identification, we show that a co...