The Cumulative Rule for Belief Fusion
  The problem of combining beliefs in the Dempster-Shafer belief theory has
attracted considerable attention over the last two decades. The classical
Dempster's Rule has often been criticised, and many alternative rules for
belief combination have been proposed in the literature. The consensus operator
for combining beliefs has nice properties and produces more intuitive results
than Dempster's rule, but has the limitation that it can only be applied to
belief distribution functions on binary state spaces. In this paper we present
a generalisation of the consensus operator that can be applied to Dirichlet
belief functions on state spaces of arbitrary size. This rule, called the
cumulative rule of belief combination, can be derived from classical
statistical theory, and corresponds well with human intuition.
