A New Approach to Belief Modeling

It has been shown that, despite the differences in approach and interpretation, all belief function based models without the so-called dynamic component lead essentially to mathematically equivalent theories – at least in the finite case. In this paper, we first argue that at the logical level these models seem to share a common formal framework and various interpretations just come at the epistemic level. We then introduce a framework for belief modeling formally based on Dempster’s structure with adopting Smets’ view of the origin of beliefs. It is shown that the proposed model is more general than previous models, and may provide a suitable unified framework for belief modeling.