An intelligent quality-based approach to fusing multi-source probabilistic information

•Investigates the fusion of probabilistic information from multiple sources.•Uses the idea of the quality of fused value as an important factor in fusion process.•Considers cases of both equally and unequally weighted fusion of sources of information.

Our objective here is to obtain quality-fused values from multiple sources of probabilistic distributions, where quality is related to the lack of uncertainty in the fused value and the use of credible sources. We first introduce a vector representation for a probability distribution. With the aid of the Gini formulation of entropy, we show how the norm of the vector provides a measure of the certainty, i.e., information, associated with a probability distribution. We look at two special cases of fusion for source inputs those that are maximally uncertain and certain. We provide a measure of credibility associated with subsets of sources. We look at the issue of finding the highest quality fused value from the weighted aggregations of source provided probability distributions.