A Novel Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm for Learning Bayesian Networks from Incomplete Data

Abstract

Existing Structural Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithms for learning Bayesian networks from incomplete data usually adopt the greedy hill climbing search method, which may make the algorithms find sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we present a new Structural EM algorithm which employs a hybrid evolutionary algorithm as the search method. The experimental results on the data sets generated from several benchmark networks illustrate that our algorithm outperforms some state-of-the-art learning algorithms.