A Mathematical Theory of Evidence

Glenn Shafer

This book was published by the Princeton University Press in 1976.It is no longer available from the publisher, buy it is available on demand from http://www.umi.com

The author was an assistant professor at Princeton University when the book was written. The first two paragraphs of his preface reads as follows:

    In the spring of 1971, I attended a course on statistical inference taught by Arthur Dempster at Harvard. In the fall of that same year Geoffrey Watson suggested I give a talk expositing Dempster's work on upper and lower probabilities to the Department of Statistics at Princeton. This essay is one fo the results of the ensuing effort. It offers a reinterpretation of Dempster's work, a reinterpretation that identifies his "lower probabilities" as epistemic probabilities or degrees of belief, takes the rule for combining such degrees of belief as fundamental, and abandons the idea that they arise as lower bounds over classes of Bayesian probabilities.

Jeff Barnet, one of the computer scientists who introduced the book's theory to the artificial intelligence community in the late 1970s and early 1980s, called the theory "the Dempster-Shafer theory," and this name has stuck.

Numerous discussions, elaborations, and applications of the Dempster-Shafer theory were published by the author and others since the book's publication. The author's most recent review of the topic was published in the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning in 1990 (Vol. 4, pp. 323-362). It was followed in 1992 by a rejoinder to comments (Vol. 6, pp. 445-480). A compilation of recent contributions by others is Advances in the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence, edited by Ronald R. Yager, Janusz Kacprzyk, and Mario Fedrizzi. Wiley, 1993.