A new justification of the unnormalized Dempster’s rule of combination from the Least Commitment Principle

The conjunctive weight function is an equivalent repre-sentation of a non dogmatic belief function. Denœux recently proposed new rules of combination for belief functions based on pointwise combination of conjunc-tive weights. This paper characterizes the rules of com-bination based on the conjunctive weight function that have the vacuous belief function as neutral element. The main result is that the unnormalized Dempster’s rule is the least committed rule amongst those rules, for a par-ticular informational ordering. A counterpart to this re-sult is also presented for the disjunctive rule