Combining dependent bodies of evidence

Dempster's combination rule can only be applied to independent bodies of evidence. One occurrence of dependence between two bodies of evidence is when they result from a common source. This paper proposes an improved method for combining dependent bodies of evidence which takes the significance of the common information sources into consideration. The method is based on the significance weighting operation and the decombination operation. A numerical example is illustrated to show the use and effectiveness of the proposed method.