Learning hierarchical Bayesian networks for large-scale data analysis

Abstract

Bayesian network learning is a useful tool for exploratory data analysis. However, applying Bayesian networks to the analysis of large-scale data, consisting of thousands of attributes, is not straightforward because of the heavy computational burden in learning and visualization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for large-scale data analysis based on hierarchical compression of information and constrained structural learning, i.e., hierarchical Bayesian networks (HBNs). The HBN can compactly visualize global probabilistic structure through a small number of hidden variables, approximately representing a large number of observed variables. An efficient learning algorithm for HBNs, which incrementally maximizes the lower bound of the likelihood function, is also suggested. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by the experiments on synthetic large-scale Bayesian networks and a real-life microarray dataset.