134,066 research outputs found
Bayesian Discovery of Multiple Bayesian Networks via Transfer Learning
Bayesian network structure learning algorithms with limited data are being
used in domains such as systems biology and neuroscience to gain insight into
the underlying processes that produce observed data. Learning reliable networks
from limited data is difficult, therefore transfer learning can improve the
robustness of learned networks by leveraging data from related tasks. Existing
transfer learning algorithms for Bayesian network structure learning give a
single maximum a posteriori estimate of network models. Yet, many other models
may be equally likely, and so a more informative result is provided by Bayesian
structure discovery. Bayesian structure discovery algorithms estimate posterior
probabilities of structural features, such as edges. We present transfer
learning for Bayesian structure discovery which allows us to explore the shared
and unique structural features among related tasks. Efficient computation
requires that our transfer learning objective factors into local calculations,
which we prove is given by a broad class of transfer biases. Theoretically, we
show the efficiency of our approach. Empirically, we show that compared to
single task learning, transfer learning is better able to positively identify
true edges. We apply the method to whole-brain neuroimaging data.Comment: 10 page
Learning Discrete Bayesian Networks from Continuous Data
Learning Bayesian networks from raw data can help provide insights into the relationships between variables. While real data often contains a mixture of discrete and continuous-valued variables, many Bayesian network structure learning algorithms assume all random variables are discrete. Thus, continuous variables are often discretized when learning a Bayesian network. However, the choice of discretization policy has significant impact on the accuracy, speed, and interpretability of the resulting models. This paper introduces a principled Bayesian discretization method for continuous variables in Bayesian networks with quadratic complexity instead of the cubic complexity of other standard techniques. Empirical demonstrations show that the proposed method is superior to the established minimum description length algorithm. In addition, this paper shows how to incorporate existing methods into the structure learning process to discretize all continuous variables and simultaneously learn Bayesian network structures
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