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Information Quality in Information Fusion and Decision Making pp 31–49Cite as

Quality of Information Sources in Information Fusion

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Part of the book series: Information Fusion and Data Science ((IFDS))

Abstract

Pieces of information can only be evaluated if knowledge about the quality of the sources of information is available. Typically, this knowledge pertains to the source relevance. In this chapter, other facets of source quality are considered, leading to a general approach to information correction and fusion for belief functions. In particular, the case where sources may partially lack truthfulness is deeply investigated. As a result, Shafer’s discounting operation and the unnormalised Dempster’s rule, which deal only with source relevance, are considerably extended. Most notably, the unnormalised Dempster’s rule is generalised to all Boolean connectives. The proposed approach also subsumes other important correction and fusion schemes, such as contextual discounting and Smets’ α-junctions. We also study the case where pieces of knowledge about the quality of the sources are independent. Finally, some means to obtain knowledge about source quality are reviewed.

This chapter is a shorter and revised version of [20].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We consider as a source any entity that supplies a non-trivial and non-self-contradictory input.

  2. 2.

    The term “lying” is used as a synonym of “telling the negation of what is believed to be the truth”, irrespective of the existence of any intention of a source to deceive.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. EA 3926, Laboratoire de Génie Informatique et d’Automatique de l’Artois (LGI2A), Université d’Artois, Béthune, France

    Frédéric Pichon

  2. CNRS, IRIT (UMR 5505), Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse Cedex 09, France

    Didier Dubois

  3. CNRS, Heudiasyc (UMR 7253), Sorbonne Universités, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Compiègne Cedex, France

    Thierry Denœux

Authors
  1. Frédéric Pichon
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  2. Didier Dubois
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  3. Thierry Denœux
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Correspondence to Frédéric Pichon .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IMT-Atlantique, Brest, France

    Éloi Bossé

  2. The State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Galina L. Rogova

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Pichon, F., Dubois, D., Denœux, T. (2019). Quality of Information Sources in Information Fusion. In: Bossé, É., Rogova, G. (eds) Information Quality in Information Fusion and Decision Making. Information Fusion and Data Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03643-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03643-0_2

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