With the rapid development of 5G and vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), the data fusion plays an increasingly important role in the driving behaviour assessment. However, the unreasonable distribution of conflicting evidence remains a significant issue for decision fusion based on evidence theory. By analysing the parameter information of driving behaviour recognition, this paper proposed a new weighted evidence combination approach to fuse the highly conflicting information. In short, the proposed combination method not only retains the excellent mathematical characteristics of Dempster's combination rule, but also fully considers the mutual relations between evidences and the influence of the characteristics of evidence body. Firstly, a new dissimilarity measure is put forward to quantify the conflict degree between the evidences. Furthermore, the uncertainty measure and internal conflict are adopted to determine the weight of each evidence. Based on the weighted averaging combination method, the reasonable combined results are obtained. According to the experimental results, the proposed method has better performance than the existing methods, and provides an effective solution for driving behaviour assessment.

The Evidential K-Nearest Neighbor (EK-NN) classifier has demonstrated robustness in handling incomplete and uncertain data; however, its application in high-dimensional big data for feature selection, such as genomic datasets with tens of thousands of gene features, remains underexplored. Our proposed Granular–Elastic Evidential K-Nearest Neighbor (GEK-NN) approach addresses this gap. In the context of big data, GEK-NN integrates an Elastic Net within the Genetic Algorithm’s fitness function to efficiently sift through vast amounts of data, identifying relevant feature subsets. This process mimics human cognitive behavior of filtering and refining information, similar to concepts in cognitive computing. A granularity metric is further employed to optimize subset size, maximizing its impact. GEK-NN consists of two crucial phases. Initially, an Elastic Net-based feature evaluation is conducted to pinpoint relevant features from the high-dimensional data. Subsequently, granularity-based optimization refines the subset size, adapting to the complexity of big data. Before applying to genomic big data, experiments on UCI datasets demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of GEK-NN. By using an Evidence Theory framework, GEK-NN overcomes feature-selection challenges in both low-dimensional UCI datasets and high-dimensional genomic big data, significantly enhancing pattern recognition and classification accuracy. Comparative analyses with existing EK-NN feature-selection methods, using both UCI and high-dimensional gene datasets, underscore GEK-NN’s superiority in handling big data for feature selection and classification. These results indicate that GEK-NN not only enriches EK-NN applications but also offers a cognitive-inspired solution for complex gene data analysis, effectively tackling high-dimensional feature-selection challenges in the realm of big data.