Evidence Sets: Modeling Subjective Categories

Zadeh’s Fuzzy Sets are extended with the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence into a new mathematical structure called Evidence Sets, which can capture more efficiently all recognized forms of uncertainty in a formalism that explicitly models the subjective context dependencies of linguistic categories. A belief-based theory of Approximate Reasoning is proposed for these structures. Evidence sets are then used in the development of a relational database architecture useful for the data mining of information stored in several networked databases. This useful data mining application establishes an Artificial Intelligence model of Cognitive Categorization with a hybrid architecture that possesses both connectionist and symbolic attributes.