Use of Evidence theory for the fusion and the estimation of relevance of data sources: application to an alcoholic bioprocess

In this paper, we present an application of the evidence theory for the classification of physiological states in a bioprocess. We are particularly interested by the relevance of the data sources which are here biochemical parameters measured during the bioprocess. The evidence theory, and more particularly the notion of conflict is used to evaluate the relevance of each data source. An other measure of conflict, based on a distance, is also used, and provides in some cases, better results than the classical notion of conflict of the evidence theory. Results are presented for two kinds of bioprocesses: batch process (which corresponds to a supervised classification) and fed-batch process (which corresponds to an unsupervised classification).