Title
Bayesian learning of Bayesian networks with informative priors
Abstract
This paper presents and evaluates an approach to Bayesian model averaging where the models are Bayesian nets (BNs). A comprehensive study of the literature on structural priors for BNs is conducted. A number of prior distributions are defined using stochastic logic programs and the MCMC Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is used to (approximately) sample from the posterior. We use proposals which are tightly coupled to the priors which give rise to cheaply computable acceptance probabilities. Experiments using data generated from known BNs have been conducted to evaluate the method. The experiments used 6 different BNs and varied: the structural prior, the parameter prior, the Metropolis-Hasting proposal and the data size. Each experiment was repeated three times with different random seeds to test the robustness of the MCMC-produced results. Our results show that with effective priors (i) robust results are produced and (ii) informative priors improve results significantly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1007/s10472-009-9133-x
Ann. Math. Artif. Intell.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Prior knowledge,Bayesian inference,Bayesian model averaging,Markov chain Monte Carlo,Loss functions,Stochastic logic programs,68T05,68T27
Journal
54
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1-3
1012-2443
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.80
20
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nicos Angelopoulos15311.48
James Cussens250350.29