In the theory of belief functions, the measure of uncertainty is an important concept, which is used for representing some types of uncertainty incorporated in bodies of evidence such as the discord and the non-specificity. For the non-specificity part, some traditional measures use for reference the Hartley measure in classical set theory; other traditional measures use the simple and heuristic function for joint use of mass assignments and the cardinality of focal elements. In this paper, a new non-specificity measure is proposed using lengths of belief intervals, which represent the degree of imprecision. Therefore, it has more intuitive physical meaning. It can be proved that our new measure can be rewritten in a general form for the non-specificity. Our new measure is also proved to be a strict non-specificity measure with some desired properties. Numerical examples, simulations, the related analyses and proofs are provided to show the characteristics and good properties of the new non-specificity definition. An example of an application of the new non- specificity measure is also presented.
Belief functions theory is an important tool in the field of information fusion. However, when the cardinality of the frame of discernment becomes large, the high computational cost of evidence combination will become the bottleneck of belief functions theory in real applications. The basic probability assignment （BPA） approximations, which can reduce the complexity of the BPAs, are always used to reduce the computational cost of evidence combination. In this paper, both the cardinalities and the mass assignment values of focal elements are used as the criteria of reduction. The two criteria are jointly used by using rank-level fusion. Some experiments and related analyses are provided to illustrate and justify the proposed new BPA approximation approach.
