Identification and Interpretation of Belief Structure in Dempster-Shafer
  Theory
  Mathematical Theory of Evidence called also Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) is
known as a foundation for reasoning when knowledge is expressed at various
levels of detail. Though much research effort has been committed to this theory
since its foundation, many questions remain open. One of the most important
open questions seems to be the relationship between frequencies and the
Mathematical Theory of Evidence. The theory is blamed to leave frequencies
outside (or aside of) its framework. The seriousness of this accusation is
obvious: (1) no experiment may be run to compare the performance of DST-based
models of real world processes against real world data, (2) data may not serve
as foundation for construction of an appropriate belief model.
  In this paper we develop a frequentist interpretation of the DST bringing to
fall the above argument against DST. An immediate consequence of it is the
possibility to develop algorithms acquiring automatically DST belief models
from data. We propose three such algorithms for various classes of belief model
structures: for tree structured belief networks, for poly-tree belief networks
and for general type belief networks.
