Högskolan i Skövde

A definition of information fusion (IF) as a field of research can benefit researchers within the field, who may use such a definition when motivating their own work and evaluating the contributions of others. Moreover, it can enable researchers and practitioners outside the field to more easily relate their own work to the field and more easily understand the scope of IF techniques and methods. Based on strengths and weaknesses of existing definitions, a definition is proposed that is argued to effectively fulfill the requirements that can be put on a definition of IF as a field of research. Although the proposed definition aims to be precise, it does not fully capture the richness and versatility of the IF field. To address that limitation, we highlight some topics to explore the scope of IF, covering the systems perspective of IF and its relation to ma-chine learning, optimization, robot behavior, opinion aggregation, and databases.

We address the problem of combining independent evidences from multiple sources by utilizing the Bayesian and credal combination operators. We present measures for degree of conflict and imprecision, which we use in order to characterize the behavior of the operators through a number of examples. We introduce discounting operators that can be used whenever information about the reliability of sources is available. The credal discounting operator discounts a credal set with respect to an interval of reliability weights, hence, we allow for expressing reliability of sources imprecisely. We prove that the credal discounting operator can be computed by using the extreme points of its operands. We also perform two experiments containing different levels of risk where we compare the performance of the Bayesian and credal combination operators by using a simple score function that measures the informativeness of a reported decision set. We show that the Bayesian combination operator performed on centroids of operand credal sets outperforms the credal combination operator when no risk is involved in the decision problem. We also show that if a risk component is present in the decision problem, a simple cautious decision policy for the Bayesian combination operator can be constructed that outperforms the corresponding credal decision policy.

This paper presents a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art of energy efficiency research. The literature review carried out focuses on the application of data mining and data analysis techniques to energy consumption data, as well as  descriptions  of  tools, applications and research prototypes to manage the consumption of energy. Moreover, preliminary results of the application of a clustering technique to energy consumption data illustrate the review.

We are interested in whether or not representing and maintaining imprecision is beneficial when combining evidences from multiple sources. We perform two experiments that contain different levels of risk and where we measure the performance of the Bayesian and credal combination operators by using a simple score function that measures the informativeness of a reported decision set. We show that the Bayesian combination operator performed on centroids of operand credal sets outperforms the credal combination operator when no risk is involved in the decision problem. We also show that if a risk component is present in the decision problem, a simple cautious decision policy for the Bayesian combination operator can be constructed that outperforms the corresponding credal decision policy.

We are interested in whether or not there exist any advantages of utilizing credal set theory for the discrete state estimation problem. We present an experiment where we compare in total six different methods, three based on Bayesian theory and three on credal set theory. The results show that Bayesian updating performed on centroids of operand credal sets significantly outperforms the other methods. We analyze the result based on degree of imprecision, position of extreme points, and second-order distributions.

We extend the State-Based Anomaly Detection approach by introducing precise and imprecise anomaly detectors using the Bayesian and credal combination operators, where evidences over time are combined into a joint evidence. We use imprecision in order to represent the sensitivity of the classification regarding an object being  normal or anomalous. We evaluate the detectors on a real-world maritime dataset containing recorded AIS data and show that the anomaly detectors outperform   previously proposed detectors based on Gaussian mixture models and kernel density estimators. We also show that our introduced anomaly detectors perform slightly better than the State-Based Anomaly Detection approach with a sliding window.

Determining how to utilize information acquisition resources optimally is a difficult task in the intelligence domain. Nevertheless, an intelligence analyst can expect little or no support for this from software tools today. In this paper, we describe a proof of concept implementation of a resource allocation mechanism for an intelligence analysis support system. The system uses a Bayesian network to structure intelligence requests, and the goal is to minimize the uncertainty of a variable of interest. A number of allocation strategies are discussed and evaluated through simulations.

We use agent-based modeling and simulation to fuse data from multiple sources to estimate the state of some system properties. This implies that the real system of interest is modeled and simulated using agent principles. Using Monte-Carlo simulation, we estimate the values of some decision-relevant numerical properties, such as utilization of resources and service levels, as a decision support for a Maintenance Service Provider. Our initial results indicate that this kind of fusion of information sources can improve the understanding of the problem domain (e.g. to what degree some critical properties influence service operations) and also generate a basis for decision-making.

Information fusion has a potential applicability to a multitude of differentapplications. Still, the JDL model is mostly used to describe defense applications.This paper describes the information fusion process for a robot removing weed ina field. We analyze the robotic system by relating it to the JDL model functions.The civilian application we consider here has some properties which differ from thetypical defense applications: (1) indifferent environment and (2) a predictable andstructured process to achieve its objectives. As a consequence, situation estimatestend to deal with internal properties of the robot and its mission progress (throughmission state transition) rather than external entities and their relations. Nevertheless, the JDL model appears useful for describing the fusion activities of the weeding robot system. We provide an example of how state transitions may be detected and exploited using information fusion and report on some initial results. An additional finding is that process refinement for this type of application can be expressed in terms of a finite state machine.