Fusion Rule Technology




Aggregation by Voting

The following four voting functions have been developed:

  • Majority Voting
    • -- The most frequently occurring term is selected, provided that frequency is greater than 0.5.

  • Popular Sharing
    • -- The most frequently occurring term or terms are selected.

  • First-Past-the-Post
    • -- The most frequently occurring term is selected. If two or more terms are tied for the greatest frequency, no term is selected.

  • Threshold Voting
    • -- The most frequently occurring term or terms are selected, provided that frequency is equal to or greater than a specified threshold.

    Each of these voting functions can be applied in one of two ways:

  • Simple Voting
    • -- The textentry from each report is assigned one vote, and the sum of votes for each (kind of) textentry is used to calculate the frequency with which it occurs.

  • Weighted Voting
    • -- The source of each report is assigned a numerical value between 0 and 1. The textentry from each report is then assigned this numerical value and the sum of these values is then used to calculate the frequency with which the textentry occurs.

    Combining the voting functions with the ways they can be applied yields eight aggregation functions for merging conflicting information. Rules embodying each of these functions can be found at the links in the following table. (The only rules amenable to aggregation by voting are 3, 19, 21, and 29.)

    Links to rules embodying voting functions.
    Simple VotingWeighted Voting
    Popular SharingFusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML     		Fusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML
    FirstPastThePostFusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML     		Fusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML
    Majority VotingFusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML     		Fusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML
    Threshold VotingFusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML     		Fusion Rules in Logical Form
    Fusion Rules in XML

    A table summarizing the results of applying these eight different voting functions to aggregating conflicting textentries for today's weather can be found as table 2 in the page on weather reports case study.

    Contact a.hunter@cs.ucl.ac.uk or +44 20 7679 7295.

    Back to the weather reports case study.

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