Decision-oriented joint optimization of evidence fusion based on event-conditioned credibility

Abstract

In decision-level fusion tasks involving heterogeneous sources with unequal precision and potential anomalies, evidence deviating from the majority may be either critical evidence supporting the correct decision or anomalous evidence supporting an incorrect event. Existing credible evidence fusion methods primarily assess credibility through inter-evidence comparisons and may consequently underestimate critical evidence. This paper proposes event-conditioned credibility to characterize the relative credibility of evidence under different candidate-event hypotheses. A decision-oriented joint optimization model then couples credibility calculation, evidence fusion, and event decision through candidate-event probabilities. The model is expressed as a continuous self-mapping on the probability simplex. A direct fixed-point iteration provides the default fast solver, while a Kuhn simplicial search supplies a mesh-dependent approximate fixed point if the direct iteration forms a periodic orbit. A plausibility--belief arithmetic--geometric divergence is further proposed to calculate event-conditioned credibility. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method gives credibility rankings that better reflect the contribution of evidence to the ground truth and provides greater support for the correct event than representative credible evidence fusion methods. Monte Carlo tests additionally demonstrate a high empirical fixed-point attainment rate over the tested settings.