Building Bayesian network classifiers through a Bayesian complexity monitoring system

Nowadays, the need for practical yet efficient machine learning techniques for engineering applications are highly in demand. A new learning method for building Bayesian network classifiers is presented in this article. The proposed method augments the naive Bayesian (NB) classifier by using the Chow and Liu tree construction method, but introducing a Bayesian approach to control the accuracy and complexity of the resulting network, which yields simple structures that are not necessarily a spanning tree. Experiments by using benchmark data sets show that the number of augmenting edges by using the proposed learning method depends on the number of training data used. The classification accuracy was better, or at least equal, to the NB and the tree augmented NB models when tested on 10 benchmark data sets. The evaluation on a real industrial application showed that the simple Bayesian network classifier outperformed the C4.5 and the random forest algorithms and achieved competitive results against C5.0 and a neural network.