Evidential Reasoning Rule With Likelihood Analysis and Perturbation Analysis

The evidential reasoning (ER) rule has been widely used in the data analysis, which provides a transparent and credible inference process and can effectively deal with various uncertainties. However, the traditional ER rule requires the evidence to be strictly independent of each other, which may not be easily satisfied in engineering practice. In addition, the perturbation can affect the sample data and cause unstable inference results. As such, in this article, a new ER rule with likelihood analysis and perturbation analysis (PA) is proposed based on the maximum likelihood ER (MAKER). The likelihood analysis is used to acquire probabilistic evidence from the sample data. The interdependence index of evidence is defined on the marginal probability and joint probability. A parameter optimization model is established based on the maximum likelihood (ML). The PA is conducted on the proposed ER rule to study its robustness, and a generalized PA method is explored to facilitate its potential applications. A case study of the performance evaluation of laser gyros is carried out to show the implementation of the proposed method and validate its effectiveness in reality.