A new sine similarity measure based on evidence theory for conflict management

Evidence theory (ET) has gained significant attention in various fields due to its advantages over probability theory. However, highly conflicting evidence can sometimes yield counterintuitive results when using Dempster’s rule. This article aims to address this issue by introducing a new sine similarity measure that integrates the belief and plausibility functions in ET. The proposed sine similarity measure offers a comprehensive evaluation of the conflict between evidences. Importantly, the proposed measure satisfies several desirable properties, ensuring its effectiveness in capturing the similarity between evidences. Furthermore, a conflict management method is designed based on the proposed sine similarity measure and belief entropy. The validity of the proposed method is verified by some numerical examples and an application to target recognition.