Conflict measure for the discounting operation on belief functions

In the belief function theory, the concept of conflict appearing while confronting several expertspsila opinions can serve for many purposes, and in particular it can be used as an indicator of the relative reliability of the experts. The traditional definition of conflict as the basic belief assigned to the empty set during the combination has several issues and in particular it may not adequately represent the disagreement between the experts in presence. Hence, we propose some alternative measures of conflict as the distance between belief functions. These measures of conflict are further used for an a posteriori estimation of the relative reliability between the sources of information. This estimation of the reliability does not need any training or prior knowledge and can then be used to discount the unreliable sources before the combination step. These measures are evaluated and debated on random basic belief assignments and on real radar data.