Combining conflicting evidence based on Pearson correlation coefficient and weighted graph

Dempster–Shafer evidence theory (evidence theory) has been widely used as an efficient method for dealing with uncertainty. In evidence theory, Dempster's rule is the most well‐known evidence combination method but it does not work well when the evidence is in high conflict. To improve the performance of combining conflicting evidence, an original and novel evidence combination method is presented based on the Pearson correlation coefficient and weighted graph. The proposed method can correctly recognize the alternative situation with a high accuracy. Besides, the convergence performance of this method is better when compared with other combination rules. In addition, the weighted graph generated by the proposed method can directly represent the relationship between different evidence, which can help researchers estimate the reliability of different body of evidence. Our experimental results indicate the advantages of our proposed evidence combination rule over existing methods, and the results are analyzed and discussed.