Widened Learning of Bayesian Network Classifiers

We demonstrate the application of Widening to learning performant Bayesian Networks for use as classifiers. Widening is a framework for utilizing parallel resources and diversity to find models in a hypothesis space that are potentially better than those of a standard greedy algorithm. This work demonstrates that widened learning of Bayesian Networks, using the Frobenius Norm of the networks’ graph Laplacian matrices as a distance measure, can create Bayesian networks that are better classifiers than those generated by popular Bayesian Network algorithms.