In this paper, we present a computationally efficient method for inducing selective Bayesian network classifiers. Our approach is to use informationtheoretic metrics to efficiently select a subset of attributes from which to learn the classifier. We explore three conditional, information-theoretic metrics that are extensions of metrics used extensively in decision tree learning, namely Quinlan's gain and gain ratio metrics and Mantaras's distance metric. We experimentally show that the algorithms based on gain ratio and distance metric learn selective Bayesian networks that have predictive accuracies as good as or better than those learned by existing selective Bayesian network induction approaches (K2-AS), but at a significantly lower computational cost. We prove that the subset-selection phase of these information-based algorithms has polynomial complexity as compared to the worst-case exponential time complexity of the corresponding phase in K2-AS. We also compare the performance o...

In this paper we present a novel induction algorithm for Bayesian networks. This selective Bayesian network classifier selects a subset of attributes that maximizes predictive accuracy prior to the network learning phase, thereby learning Bayesian networks with a bias for small, high-predictive-accuracy networks. We compare the performance of this classifier with selective and non-selective naive Bayesian classifiers. We show that the selective Bayesian network classifier performs significantly better than both versions of the naive Bayesian classifier on almost all databases analyzed, and hence is an enhancement of the naive Bayesian classifier. Relative to the non-selective Bayesian network classifier, our selective Bayesian network classifier generates networks that are computationally simpler to evaluate and that display predictive accuracy comparable to that of Bayesian networks which model all features. 1 INTRODUCTION Bayesian induction methods have proven to be an important cla...