Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2008

Abstract

While Bayesian network (BN) can achieve accurate predictions even with erroneous or incomplete evidence, explaining the inferences remains a challenge. Existing approaches fall short because they do not exploit variable interactions and cannot account for compensations during inferences. This paper proposes the Explaining BN Inferences (EBI) procedure for explaining how variables interact to reach conclusions. EBI explains the value of a target node in terms of the influential nodes in the target's Markov blanket under specific contexts, where the Markov nodes include the target's parents, children, and the children's other parents. Working back from the target node, EBI shows the derivation of each intermediate variable, and finally explains how missing and erroneous evidence values are compensated. We validated EBI on a variety of problem domains, including mushroom classification, water purification and web page recommendation. The experiments show that EBI generates high quality, concise and comprehensible explanations for BN inferences, in particular the underlying compensation mechanism that enables BN to outperform alternative prediction systems, such as decision tree.

Keywords

Bayesian networks, Explanations, Inferences, Compensations, Error values, Missing values

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Publication

Applied Intelligence

Volume

29

Issue

3

First Page

263

Last Page

278

ISSN

0924-669X

Identifier

10.1007/s10489-007-0093-8

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-007-0093-8

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