Previous algorithms for the recovery of Bayesian belief network structures from data have been either highly dependent on conditional independence (CI) tests, or have required on ordering on the nodes to be supplied by the user. We present an algorithm that integrates these two approaches: CI tests are used to generate an ordering on the nodes from the database, which is then used to recover the underlying Bayesian network structure using a non-Cl-test-based method. Results of the evaluation of the algorithm on a number of databases (e.g., ALARM, LED, and SOYBEAN) are presented. We also discuss some algorithm performance issues and open problems.

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...

Two or more Bayesian network structures are Markov equivalent when the corresponding acyclic digraphs encode the same set of conditional independencies. Therefore, the search space of Bayesian network structures may be organized in equivalence classes, where each of them represents a different set of conditional independencies. The collection of sets of conditional independencies obeys a partial order, the so-called “inclusion order.” This paper discusses in depth the role that the inclusion order plays in learning the structure of Bayesian networks. In particular, this role involves the way a learning algorithm traverses the search space. We introduce a condition for traversal operators, the inclusion boundary condition, which, when it is satisfied, guarantees that the search strategy can avoid local maxima. This is proved under the assumptions that the data is sampled from a probability distribution which is faithful to an acyclic digraph, and the length of the sample is unbounded. The previous discussion leads to the design of a new traversal operator and two new learning algorithms in the context of heuristic search and the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. We carry out a set of experiments with synthetic and real-world data that show empirically the benefit of striving for the inclusion order when learning Bayesian networks from data.

A probabilistic network is a graphical model that encodes probabilistic relationships between variables of interest. Such a model records qualitative influences between variables in addition to the numerical parameters of the probability distribution. As such it provides an ideal form for combining prior knowledge, which might be limited solely to experience of the influences between some of the variables of interest, and data. In this paper, we first show how data can be used to revise initial estimates of the parameters of a model. We then progress to showing how the structure of the model can be revised as data is obtained. Techniques for learning with incomplete data are also covered.

Probabilistic networks can be constructed from a database of cases by selecting a network that has highest quality with respect to this database according to a given measure. A new measure is presented for this purpose based on a minimum description length (MDL) approach. This measure is compared with a commonly used measure based on a Bayesian approach both from a theoretical and an experimental point of view. We show that the two measures have the same properties for infinite large databases. For smaller databases, however, the MDL measure assigns equal quality to networks that represent the same set of independencies while the Bayesian measure does not. Preliminary test results suggest that an algorithm for learning probabilistic networks using the minimum description length approach performs comparably to a learning algorithm using the Bayesian approach. However, the former is slightly faster.

Abstract. This paper presents a simple, efficient computer-based method for discovering causal relationships from databases that contain observational data. Observational data is passively observed, as contrasted with experimental data. Most of the databases available for data mining are observational. There is great potential for mining such databases to discover causal relationships. We illustrate how observational data can constrain the causal relationships among measured variables, sometimes to the point that we can conclude that one variable is causing another variable. The presentation here is based on a constraint-based approach to causal discovery. A primary purpose of this paper is to present the constraint-based causal discovery method in the simplest possible fashion in order to (1) readily convey the basic ideas that underlie more complex constraint-based causal discovery techniques, and (2) permit interested readers to rapidly program and apply the method to their own databases, as a start toward using more elaborate causal discovery algorithms.

This paper introduces a novel enhancement for learning Bayesian networks with a bias for small, high-predictive-accuracy networks. The new approach selects a subset of features which maximizes predictive accuracy prior to the network learning phase. We examine explicitly the effects of two aspects of the algorithm, feature selection and node ordering. Our approach generates networks which are computationally simpler to evaluate and which display predictive accuracy comparable to that of Bayesian networks which model all attributes. 1 INTRODUCTION Bayesian networks are being increasingly recognized as an important representation for probabilistic reasoning. For many domains, the need to specify the probability distributions for a Bayesian network is considerable, and learning these probabilities from data using an algorithm like K2 [8] 1 could alleviate such specification difficulties. We describe an extension to the Bayesian network learning approaches introduced in K2. Rather than ...

This paper proposes and evaluates the k-greedy equivalence search algorithm (KES) for learning Bayesian networks (BNs) from complete data. The main characteristic of KES is that it allows a trade-off between greediness and randomness, thus exploring different good local optima when run repeatedly. When

Abstract. We propose an algorithm for learning the Markov boundary of a random variable from data without having to learn a complete Bayesian network. The algorithm is correct under the faithfulness assumption, scalable and data efficient. The last two properties are important because we aim to apply the algorithm to identify the minimal set of random variables that is relevant for probabilistic classification in databases with many random variables but few instances. We report experiments with synthetic and real databases with 37, 441 and 139352 random variables showing that the algorithm performs satisfactorily. 1

Determining the relationship between structure (i.e. morphology) and function is a fundamental problem in brain research. In this paper we present a new framework based on Bayesian clustering methods for the voxel-wise statistical morphology-function analysis of registered MR images. We construct a Bayesian network to automatically identify the significant associations between voxel-wise morphological variables and functional variables, such as cognitive performance. A Bayesian latent variable induction method is applied to locate the homogeneous association regions on registered maps of morphological variables. Experimental results on images with simulated atrophy confirm that the new method outperforms conventional statistical method, based on linear statistics.