Enhancing flexibility of belief representations

Abstract

Several attempts have been made to enhance the flexibility of belief representation in the Shafer model. This paper questions their ability to retain the intuitiveness. A method of enhancing the flexibility of belief representations, without compromising the intuitiveness is proposed. In it we relax the Shafer's exclusivity constraint by disregarding the formalism: 'subsets as propositions' and expressing support as functions of propositions. A compact and intuitive notation for propositions, termed N-of, is introduced. This notation simplifies the formulation of propositions from the statements humans make.