On Kenn's Rule of Combination Applied to Breast Cancer Precision Therapy

TECHNICAL NOTE - TN-2023-02-28, FEBRUARY 2023. 1 Abstract This short technical note points out an erroneous claim about a new rule of combination of basic belief assignments presented recently by Kenn et al. in [1], referred as Kenn's rule of combination (or just as KRC for short). We prove thanks a very simple counter-example that Kenn's rule is not associative. Consequently, the results of the method proposed by Kenn et al. highly depends on the ad-hoc sequential order chosen for the fusion process as proposed by the authors. This serious problem casts in doubt the interest of this method and its real ability to provide trustful results and to make good decisions to help for precise breast cancer therapy. Recently a paper devoted to the Breast Cancer Precision Therapy by Kenn et al. [1] attracted our attention for two main reasons: 1) this application of information fusion is very interesting and important; 2) Kenn's et al. method is based on a new rule of combination of basic belief assignments (BBAs).