Conditions under which conditional independence and scoring methods lead to identical selection of Bayesian network models

  • Authors:
  • Robert G. Cowell

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Actuarial Science and Statistics, City University, London, London, UK

  • Venue:
  • UAI'01 Proceedings of the Seventeenth conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

It is often stated in papers tackling the task of selecting a Bayesian network structure from data that there are these two distinct approaches: (i) Apply conditional independence tests when testing for the presence or otherwise of edges; (ii) Search the model space using a scoring metric. Here I argue that for complete data and a given node ordering this division is largely a myth, by showing that cross entropy methods for checking conditional independence are mathematically identical to methods based upon discriminating between models by their overall goodness-of-fit logarithmic scores.