A methodology, a system, and an apparatus is defined for performing evidence-based decision-making about matching a given entity against one or more of a set of known or reference entities. A satisfactory decision is achieved as a function of both potentiality and plausibility, where plausibility refers to the full set of values garnered by the evidence accumulation process in the process of generating belief/disbelief/uncertainty/conflict masses. Potentiality is a mechanism to set the various match threshold values, where the thresholds define acceptable confidence levels for decision-making. Evidence is computed on the basis of partial matching of feature vector elements, where separate and distinct feature vectors are associated with both the given entity and each of the reference entities. Following evidence-combination methods, evidence is accrued for both the positive and negative decisions regarding a potential match.