We examine the Bayesian approach to the discovery of directed acyclic causal models and compare it to the constraint-based approach. Both approaches rely on the Causal Markov assumption, but the two differ significantly in theory and practice. An important difference between the approaches is that the constraint-based approach uses categorical information about conditional-independence constraints in the domain, whereas the Bayesian approach weighs the degree to which such constraints hold. As a result, the Bayesian approach has three distinct advantages over its constraint-based counterpart. One, conclusions derived from the Bayesian approach are not susceptible to incorrect categorical decisions about independence facts that can occur with data sets of finite size. Two, using the Bayesian approach, finer distinctions among model structures---both quantitative and qualitative---can be made. Three, information from several models can be combined to make better inferences and to better ...

ABayesian network is a probabilistic representation for uncertain relationships, which has proven to be useful for modeling real-world problems. When there are many potential causes of a given e ect, however, both probability assessment and inference using a Bayesian network can be di cult. In this paper, we describe causal independence, a collection of conditional independence assertions and functional relationships that are often appropriate to apply to the representation of the uncertain interactions between causes and e ect. We show how the use of causal independence in a Bayesian network can greatly simplify probability assessment aswell as probabilistic inference. 1

Whereas acausal Bayesian networks represent probabilistic independence, causal Bayesian networks represent causal relationships. In this paper, we examine Bayesian methods for learning both types of networks. Bayesian methods for learning acausal networks are fairly well developed. These methods often employ assumptions to facilitate the construction of priors, including the assumptions of parameter independence, parameter modularity, and likelihood equivalence. We show that although these assumptions also can be appropriate for learning causal networks, we need additional assumptions in order to learn causal networks. We introduce two sufficient assumptions, called mechanism independence and component independence. We show that these new assumptions, when combined with parameter independence, parameter modularity, and likelihood equivalence, allow us to apply methods for learning acausal networks to learn causal networks. 1

Spiegelhalter and Lauritzen [15] studied sequential learning in Bayesian networks and proposed three models for the representation of conditional probabilities. A forth model, shown here, assumes that the parameter distribution is given by a product of Gaussian functions and updates them from the and messages of evidence propagation. We also generalize the noisy OR-gate for multivalued variables, develop the algorithm to compute probability in time proportional to the number of parents (even in networks with loops) and apply the learning model to this gate.

MS Manners is a mechanism that employs progress-based regulation to prevent resource contention with lowimportance processes from degrading the performance of high-importance processes. The mechanism assumes that resource contention that degrades the performance of a high-importance process will also retard the progress of the low-importance process. MS Manners detects this contention by monitoring the progress of the lowimportance process and inferring resource contention from a drop in the progress rate. This technique recognizes contention over any system resource, as long as the performance impact on contending processes is roughly symmetric. MS Manners employs statistical mechanisms to deal with stochastic progress measurements; it automatically calibrates a target progress rate, so no manual tuning is required; it supports multiple progress metrics from applications that perform several distinct tasks; and it orchestrates multiple low-importance processes to prevent measurement i...

In this paper, we propose the application of the hierarchical Bayesian paradigm to the image restoration problem. We derive expressions for the iterative evaluation of the two hyperparameters applying the evidence and maximum a posteriori (MAP) analysis within the hierarchical Bayesian paradigm. We show analytically that the analysis provided by the evidence approach is more realistic and appropriate than the MAP approach for the image restoration problem. We furthermore study the relationship between the evidence and an iterative approach resulting from the set theoretic regularization approach for estimating the two hyperparameters, or their ratio, defined as the regularization parameter. Finally the proposed algorithms are tested experimentally.

Abstract — In this paper, we introduce a new approach to location estimation where, instead of locating a single client, we simultaneously locate a set of wireless clients. We present a Bayesian hierarchical model for indoor location estimation in wireless networks. We demonstrate that our model achieves accuracy that is similar to other published models and algorithms. By harnessing prior knowledge, our model eliminates the requirement for training data as compared with existing approaches, thereby introducing the notion of a fully adaptive zero profiling approach to location estimation. Index Terms — Experimentation with real networks/Testbed, Statistics, WLAN, localization,

Bayesian methods are becoming increasingly popular in the development of intelligent machines. Bayesian Belief Networks (bbns) are nowaday a prominent reasoning method and, during the past few years, several efforts have been addressed to develop methods able to learn bbns directly from databases. However, all these methods assume that the database is complete or, at least, that unreported data are missing at random. Unfortunately, real-world databases are rarely complete and the "Missing at Random" assumption is often unrealistic. This paper shows that this assumption can dramatically affect the reliability of the learned bbn and introduces a robust method to learn conditional probabilities in a bbn, which does not rely on this assumption. In order to drop this assumption, we have to change the overall learning strategy used by traditional Bayesian methods: our method bounds the set of all posterior probabilities consistent with the database and proceed by refining this set as more i...

There is an obvious need for improving the performance and accuracy of a Bayesian network as new data is observed. Because of errors in model construction and changes in the dynamics of the domains, we cannot afford to ignore the information in new data. While sequential update of parameters for a fixed structure can be accomplished using standard techniques, sequential update of network structure is still an open problem. In this paper, we investigate sequential update of Bayesian networks were both parameters and structure are expected to change. We introduce a new approach that allows for the flexible manipulation of the tradeoff between the quality of the learned networks and the amount of information that is maintained about past observations. We formally describe our approach including the necessary modifications to the scoring functions for learning Bayesian networks, evaluate its effectiveness through and empirical study, and extend it to the case of missing data. 1 Introductio...

We extend the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), an asymptotic approximation for the marginal likelihood, to Bayesian networks with hidden variables. This approximation can be used to select models given large samples of data. The standard BIC as well as our extension punishes the complexity of a model according to the dimension of its parameters. We argue that the dimension of a Bayesian network with hidden variables is the rank of the Jacobian matrix of the transformation between the parameters of the network and the parameters of the observable variables. We compute the dimensions of several networks including the naive Bayes model with a hidden root node. 1