Contradiction measures and specificity degrees of basic belief assignments

Abstract: In the theory of belief functions, many measures of uncertainty have been introduced. However, it is not always easy to understand what these measures really try to represent. In this paper, we re-interpret some measures of uncertainty in the theory of belief functions. We present some interests and drawbacks of the existing measures. On these observations, we introduce a measure of contradiction. Therefore, we present some degrees of non-specificity and Bayesianity of a mass. We propose a degree of specificity based on the distance between a mass and its most specific associated mass. We also show how to use the degree of specificity to measure the specificity of a fusion rule. Illustrations on simple examples are given.