A Deng Entropy-Based Heuristic Method to Determine Discounting Coefficient in Dempster-Shafer Evidence Fusion

Conflict management is crucial in information fusion. One of the efficient algorithms to address conflicting data fusion is discounting method. However, how to determine the discounting coefficient in conflict management remains an open issue. A heuristic method to determine discounting coefficient is presented based on Deng entropy and sigmoid function. Where Deng entropy quantifies the uncertainty of evidence and the sigmoid function maps it to a reasonable coefficient range. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by numerical example and real application. Compared with existing methods to determine discounting coefficients, the proposed method shows promising performance in the analyzed examples and is simple to implement.