• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.27 no.8
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• pp.855-863
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• 2000

Although Behavior-Knowledge Space (BKS) method, one of well known decision combination methods, does not need any assumptions in combining the multiple experts, it should theoretically build exponential storage spaces for storing and managing jointly observed K decisions from K experts. That is, combining K experts needs a (K+1)st-order probability distribution. However, it is well known that the distribution becomes unmanageable in storing and estimating, even for a small K. In order to overcome such weakness, it has been studied to decompose a probability distribution into a number of component distributions and to approximate the distribution with a product of the component distributions. One of such previous works is to apply a conditional independence assumption to the distribution. Another work is to approximate the distribution with a product of only first-order tree dependencies or second-order distributions as shown in [1]. In this paper, higher order dependency than the first-order is considered in approximating the distribution and a dependency-based framework is proposed to optimally approximate the (K+1)st-order probability distribution with a product set of dth-order dependencies where ($1{\le}d{\le}K$), and to combine multiple experts based on the product set using the Bayesian formalism. This framework was experimented and evaluated with a standardized CENPARMI data base.