CBD: A New Divergence Measure for Complex Mass Function and its Application in Pattern Recognition

Abstract The theory of complex mass function is an effective method to deal with uncertainty information, and it is a generalized of Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. However, divergence measure is still an open issue in the realm of complex mass function theory. The main contribution of our paper is to propose a generalized divergence measure for complex mass function that is called complex belief divergence (CBD),which has the properties of symmetry, nonnegativity, nondegeneracy. When complex mass function degenerates into classical mass function, the CBD will degenerate into classical belief divergence, which has a better ability to measure uncertainty of information. Finally, a pattern recognition algorithm based on CBD is designed and applied to a medical diagnosis problem, which proves its practical prospect.