A belief structure is a distributed assessment with
belief
A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take ...
s.
Evidential reasoning
A belief structure is used in the
evidential reasoning (ER) approach for
multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to represent the performance of an alternative option on a criterion.
In the ER approach, an MCDA problem is modelled by a
belief decision matrix
A decision matrix is a list of values in rows and columns that allows an analyst to systematically identify, analyze, and rate the performance of relationships between sets of values and information. Elements of a decision matrix show decisions bas ...
instead of a conventional
decision matrix
A decision matrix is a list of values in rows and columns that allows an analyst to systematically identify, analyze, and rate the performance of relationships between sets of values and information. Elements of a decision matrix show decisions bas ...
. The difference between the two is that, in the former, each element is a belief structure; in the latter, conversely, each element is a single value (either numerical or textual).
Application
For example, the quality of a car engine may be assessed to be “excellent” with a high degree of belief (e.g. 0.6) due to its low
fuel consumption
A fuel is any material that can be made to react with other substances so that it releases energy as thermal energy or to be used for work. The concept was originally applied solely to those materials capable of releasing chemical energy but ...
, low vibration and high responsiveness. At the same time, the quality may be assessed to be only “good” with a lower degree of belief (e.g. 0.4 or less) because its quietness and starting can still be improved. Such an assessment can be modeled by a belief structure: ''Si''(engine)=, where ''Si'' stands for the assessment of engine on the ''i''th criterion (quality). In the belief structure, “excellent” and “good” are assessment standards, whilst “0.6” and “0.4” are degrees of belief.
References
Sources
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Multiple-criteria decision analysis
Management systems