Inductive Transfer for Bayesian Network Structure Learning

Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil, Rich Caruana; JMLR W&P 2:339-346, 2007.

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning Bayes Net structures for related tasks. We present an algorithm for learning Bayes Net structures that takes advantage of the similarity between tasks by biasing learning toward similar structures for each task. Heuristic search is used to find a high scoring set of structures (one for each task), where the score for a set of structures is computed in a principled way. Experiments on problems generated from the ALARM and INSURANCE networks show that learning the structures for related tasks using the proposed method yields better results than learning the structures independently.