Using Pairwise Comparisons to Estimate Mass Assignments in Evidence Theory

Evidence Theory (a.k.a. Dempster-Shafer theory) offers a quite general and powerful setting to reason under uncertainty. However, most of the approaches allowing one to instantiate mass functions, the basic building block of the theory, rely on measured, objective data, and there are very few approaches to instantiate them from subjective, expert opinions. Here we suggest a viable solution, based on the concept of pairwise comparisons, for the elicitation of such subjective information. The approach is based on the well-established body of knowledge on the theory of pairwise comparisons and shows its flexibility as it can incorporate multiple representations for the subjective judgments and multiple experts, just to cite two possible extensions.