A novel belief χ2 ${\chi }^{2}$ divergence for multisource information fusion and its application in pattern classification

Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory is invaluable in the domain of multisource information fusion for handing uncertainty problems. However, there may be counter-intuitive phenomenon when facing highly conflicting information. In this paper, a novel symmetric enhanced belief χ 2 ${\chi }^{2}$ divergence measure, called S E B χ 2 $SEB{\chi }^{2}$ , is proposed to measure the discrepancy between basic probability assignments (BPAs). The S E B χ 2 $SEB{\chi }^{2}$ divergence consider the features of BPAs as the influence of both single-element subsets and multielement subsets is taken into account. Furthermore, the S E B χ 2 $SEB{\chi }^{2}$ divergence is proven to be symmetric, nonnegative and nondegenerate, which are desirable properties for conflict management. Then, a new algorithm for multisource information fusion based on the S E B χ 2 $SEB{\chi }^{2}$ divergence measure is derived. Finally, an application for pattern classification is used to illustrate the superiority of the proposed S E B χ 2 $SEB{\chi }^{2}$ divergence measure-based fusion method over other existing well-known and recent related works with a better classification accuracy of 94.39%.