Evidential Reasoning with Conditional Belief Functions

Abstract: In the existing evidential networks with belief functions, the relations among the variables are always represented by joint belief functions on the product space of the involved variables. In this paper, we use conditional belief functions to represent such relations in the network and show some relations of these two kinds of representations. We also present a propagation algorithm for such networks. By analyzing the properties of some special evidential networks with conditional belief functions, we show that the reasoning process can be simplified in such kinds of networks.