Abstract

The Bayesian network formalism is becoming increasingly popular in many areas such as decision aid, diagnosis and complex systems control, in particular thanks to its inference capabilities, even when data are incomplete. Besides, estimating the parameters of a fixed-structure Bayesian network is easy. However, very few methods are capable of using incomplete cases as a base to determine the structure of a Bayesian network. In this paper, we take up the structural EM algorithm principle [9, 10] to propose an algorithm which extends the Maximum Weight Spanning Tree algorithm to deal with incomplete data. We also propose to use this extension in order to (1) speed up the structural EM algorithm or (2) in classification tasks extend the Tree Augmented Naive classifier in order to deal with incomplete data. 1.

Citations