Focal elements generated by the Dempster-Shafer theoretic conditionals: A complete characterization

Abstract

Incorporation of soft evidence into the fusion process poses considerable challenges, including issues related to the material implications of propositional logic statements, contradictory evidence, and non-identical scopes of sources providing soft evidence. The conditional approach to Dempster-Shafer (DS) theoretic evidence updating and fusion provides a promising avenue for overcoming these challenges. However, the computation of the Fagin-Halpern (FH) conditionals utilized in the conditional evidence updating strategies is non-trivial because of the lack of a method to identify the conditional focal elements directly. The work in this paper presents a complete characterization of the conditional focal elements via a necessary and sufficient condition that identifies the explicit structure of a proposition that will remain a focal element after conditioning. We illustrate the resulting computational advantage via several experiments.