Evidence-theory-based analysis for the prediction of exterior acoustic field with epistemic uncertainties

Evidence theory has a strong ability to handle the epistemic uncertainty, based on which the uncertain parameters with limited information can be conveniently treated. In this paper, a numerical method is developed to predict the exterior acoustic field with epistemic uncertainties based on evidence theory. In order to alleviate the computational cost, the interval analysis technique is adopted to acquire the approximate frequency response amplitude bounds for each focal element, and the corresponding formulations of interval perturbation analysis for exterior acoustic field prediction are deduced. Inspired by the probability theory, the mean value, standard deviation and cumulative distribution are used to describe the distribution characteristics of evidence variables. Two numerical examples are given to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the present method.