language: en

An Algorithm for Bayesian Belief Network Construction from Data

Jie Cheng, David A. Bell, Weiru Liu
School of Information and Software Engineering University of Ulster at Jordanstown
Northern Ireland, UK, BT37 0QB
email: {j.cheng, da.bell, w.liu}@ulst.ac.uk

Abstract This paper presents an efficient algorithm for constructing Bayesian belief networks from databases. The algorithm takes a database and an attributes ordering (i.e., the causal attributes of an attribute should appear earlier in the order) as input and constructs a belief network structure as output. The construction process is based on the computation of mutual information of attribute pairs. Given a data set which is large enough and has a DAG-Isomorphic probability distribution, this algorithm guarantees that the perfect map [1] of the underlying dependency model is generated, and at the same time, enjoys the time complexity of O N( ) 2 on conditional independence (CI) tests. To evaluate this algorithm, we present the experimental results on three versions of the well-known ALARM network database, which has 37 attributes and 10,000 records. The correctness proof and the analysis of computational complexity are also presented. We also discuss the features of our work and relate it to previous works.

1 Introduction