Two-Valued Quantitative Approaches

Abstract

In this chapter, two approaches for reasoning under uncertainty, the Dempster-Shafer theory and the INFERNO system, are discussed. Both are characterized by two numbers, lower and upper bounds, describing uncertainty. The first ideas of the Dempster-Shafer theory, called also the belief function theory or evidence theory, appeared in the seventeenth century, in works of G. Hooper and J. Bernoulli. The INERNO system was introduced in Quinlan (1983b). A number of systems, reasoning under uncertainty using the Dempster-Shafer theory, have been implemented, for example, Lowrance et al. (1986), Biswas and Anand (1987), Zarley et al. (1988).