Fast Fusion of Basic Belief Assignments Defined on a Dichotomous Frame of Discernment

In this paper, we propose a new fusion approach to combine basic belief assignments (BBAs) defined on a dichotomous frame of discernment based on their canonical decomposition. In a companion paper, we have already proved that the canonical decomposition of this type of BBA (called dichotomous BBA) is always possible and unique thanks to the proportional conflict redistribution rule No 5 (PCR5). More precisely, any dichotomous BBA is always the PCR5 combination of two simpler basic belief assignments named respectively the pro-evidence, and the contra-evidence. From this interesting canonical decomposition, we present a new way of combining many dichotomous BBAs and we show that the computational time for fusing these dichotomous BBAs based on their canonical decomposition is quasi-linear with the number of sources to combine, contrary to the direct fusion of the dichotomous BBAs altogether.