Application of Dempster–Shafer Data Fusion Technique in Support of Decision Making with Big Data

This paper introduces applications of the Dempster–Shafer (D-S) data fusion technique in transportation system decision making. D-S inference is a statistics-based data classification technique, and it can be used when data sources contribute discontinuous and incomplete information and no single data source can produce an overwhelmingly high probability of certainty for identifying the most probable event. The technique captures and combines the information contributed by the data sources by using Dempster’s rule to find the conjunction of the events and to determine the highest associated probability. The D-S theory is explained and its implementation described through numerical examples of a ride-hauling service and of crowd management at a subway station. Results from the applications have shown that the technique is very effective in dealing with incomplete information and multiple data sources in the era of big data.