An empirical study of Bayesian network parameter learning with monotonic influence constraints

Learning the conditional probability table (CPT) parameters of Bayesian networks (BNs) is a key challenge in real-world decision support applications, especially when there are limited data available. A conventional way to address this challenge is to introduce domain knowledge/expert judgments that are encoded as qualitative parameter constraints. In this paper we focus on a class of constraints which is naturally encoded in the edges of BNs with monotonic influences. Experimental results indicate that such monotonic influence constraints are widespread in practical BNs (all BNs used in the study contain such monotonic influences). To exploit expert knowledge about such constraints we have developed an improved constrained optimization algorithm, which achieves good parameter learning performance using these constraints, especially when data are limited. Specifically, this algorithm outperforms the previous state-of-the-art and is also robust to errors in labelling the monotonic influences. The method is applied to a real world medical decision support BN where we had access to expert-provided constraints and real hospital data. The results suggest that incorporating expert judgments about monotonic influence constraints can lead to more accurate BNs for decision support and risk analysis. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.