The Impact of Variable Ordering on Bayesian Network Structure Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kitson, Neville K, Constantinou, Anthony C
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2022
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author Kitson, Neville K
Constantinou, Anthony C
author_facet Kitson, Neville K
Constantinou, Anthony C
contents Causal Bayesian Networks provide an important tool for reasoning under uncertainty with potential application to many complex causal systems. Structure learning algorithms that can tell us something about the causal structure of these systems are becoming increasingly important. In the literature, the validity of these algorithms is often tested for sensitivity over varying sample sizes, hyper-parameters, and occasionally objective functions. In this paper, we show that the order in which the variables are read from data can have much greater impact on the accuracy of the algorithm than these factors. Because the variable ordering is arbitrary, any significant effect it has on learnt graph accuracy is concerning, and this raises questions about the validity of the results produced by algorithms that are sensitive to, but have not been assessed against, different variable orderings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_08952
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Variable Ordering on Bayesian Network Structure Learning
Kitson, Neville K
Constantinou, Anthony C
Machine Learning
Causal Bayesian Networks provide an important tool for reasoning under uncertainty with potential application to many complex causal systems. Structure learning algorithms that can tell us something about the causal structure of these systems are becoming increasingly important. In the literature, the validity of these algorithms is often tested for sensitivity over varying sample sizes, hyper-parameters, and occasionally objective functions. In this paper, we show that the order in which the variables are read from data can have much greater impact on the accuracy of the algorithm than these factors. Because the variable ordering is arbitrary, any significant effect it has on learnt graph accuracy is concerning, and this raises questions about the validity of the results produced by algorithms that are sensitive to, but have not been assessed against, different variable orderings.
title The Impact of Variable Ordering on Bayesian Network Structure Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08952