General Bayesian Network Approach to Health Informatics Prediction: Emphasis on Performance Comparison

The football match outcome prediction particularly has gained popularity in recent years. It attract lots type of fan from the analyst expert, managerial of football team and others to predict the football match result before the match start.There are three types of approaches had been proposed to predict win, lose or draw; and evaluate the attributes of the football team. The approaches are statistical approach, machine learningapproach and Bayesian approach. This paper propose the Bayesian approaches within machine learning approaches such as Naive Bayes (NB), Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) and General Bayesian Network (K2) to predict the football match outcome. The required of football data is the English Premier League match results for three seasons; 2016 – 2017, 2015 – 2016 and 2014 – 2015 downloaded from http://www.football-data.co.uk. The experimental results showed that TAN achieved the highest predictive accuracy of 90.0 % in average across three seasons among others Bayesian approach (K2 and NB). The result from this research is hope that it can be used in future research for predicting the football match outcome.

Interval data are widely used in real applications to represent the values of quantities in uncertain situations. However, the implied probabilistic causal relationships among interval-valued variables with interval data cannot be represented and inferred by general Bayesian networks with point-based probability parameters. Thus, it is desired to extend the general Bayesian network with effective mechanisms of representation, learning and inference of probabilistic causal relationships implied in interval data. In this paper, we define the interval probabilities, the bound-limited weak conditional interval probabilities and the probabilistic description, as well as the multiplication rules. Furthermore, we propose the method for learning the Bayesian network structure from interval data and the algorithm for corresponding approximate inferences. Experimental results show that our methods are feasible, and we conclude that the Bayesian network with interval probability parameters is the expansion of the general Bayesian network.

This paper proposes the general Bayesian network as a tool for identifying critical dependencies among complex human beliefs, especially for the case of airline service industry. When we consider an overall efficacy of the flight operation, to understand underlying beliefs between pilots and controllers is critical. However, even for the experts in organizational behavior, it is difficult to identify dependencies among such the beliefs. To tackle this ambiguous issue, we suggest the use of the general Bayesian network to automatically generate interesting hypotheses. The experimental results reveal the possibility of selective attention to the critical dependencies for achieving enhanced efficacy.

2U: an exact interval propagation algorithm for polytrees with binary variables

It is widely conjectured that the excellent ROC performance of biological vision systems is due in large part to the exploitation of context at each of many levels in a part/whole hierarchy. We propose a mathematical framework (a machine) for constructing probabilistic hierarchical image models, designed to accommodate arbitrary contextual relationships, and we build a demonstration system for reading Massachusetts license plates in an image set collected at Logan Airport. The demonstration system detects and correctly reads more than 98% of the plates, with a negligible rate of false detection. Unlike a formal grammar, the architecture of a composition machine does not exclude the sharing of sub-parts among multiple entities, and does not limit interpretations to single trees (e.g. a scene can have multiple license plates, or no plates at all). In this sense, the architecture is more like a general Bayesian network than a formal grammar. On the other hand, unlike a Bayesian network, the distribution is non-Markovian, and therefore more like a probabilistic context-sensitive grammar. The conceptualization and construction of a composition machine is facilitated by its formulation as the result of a series of non-Markovian perturbations of a Markov backbone.

This paper deals with the problem of coordinating a team of mobile sensor platforms searching for a single mobile non-evading target. It follows the general Bayesian active sensor network approach introduced in [2] where each decision maker plans locally based on an equivalent representation of the target state probability density function (PDF). This paper focuses on the prediction stage of the decentralized Bayesian filter. It looks at how different types of realistic external constraints may affect the target motion and how they may be taken into account in the process model. Two general classes of constraints are identified soft and hard. A few constraint examples from each class are given to illustrate their impact on the evolution of the target state PDF. Multiple constraints of various types can be combined to increase the accuracy of the predicted PDF estimate, thus affecting the individual trajectories of the search platforms. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated for a team of airborne search vehicles looking for a drifting target lost in a storm at sea.

Improving logistics performance by reforming the pillars of Global Competitiveness Index

On the basis of Bayesian network, evidence theory is introduced, a kind of distributed power network fault diagnosis method based on Naive Bayesian network and D-S evidence theory is proposed. Firstly, the fault area is determined by the real-time connection method, the fault region is segmented by the butterfly segmentation method. Secondly, according to the historical fault samples, the decision table is established, and knowledge reduction based on Rough Set Theory. The naive Bayesian network model is constructed according the best combination, and the probability of each node is trained. Finally, D-S evidence fusion is performed on the fault component diagnosis information in the overlap between the subnets. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the complexity of modeling and improve the fault tolerance of the system in the condition of incomplete information, and has good diagnosis results.

More Complex Cases: General Bayesian Networks

Corporate credit ratings are based on a variety of information, including financial statements, annual reports, management interviews, etc. Financial indicators are critical to evaluate corporate creditworthiness. However, little is known about how qualitative information hidden in firm-related documents manifests in credit rating process. To address this issue, this study aims to develop a methodology for extracting topical content from firm-related documents using latent semantic analysis. This information is integrated with traditional financial indicators into a multi-class corporate credit rating prediction model. Informative indicators are obtained using a correlation-based filter in the process of feature selection. We demonstrate that Naive Bayesian networks perform statistically equivalent to other machine learning methods in terms of classification performance. We further show that the “red flag” values obtained using Naive Bayesian networks may indicate a low credit quality (non-investment rating classes) of firms. These findings can be particularly important for investors, banks and market regulators.

In many applications, one can define a large set of features to support the classification task at hand. At test time, however, these become prohibitively expensive to evaluate, and only a small subset of features is used, often selected for their information-theoretic value. For threshold-based, Naive Bayes classifiers, recent work has suggested selecting features that maximize the expected robustness of the classifier, that is, the expected probability it maintains its decision after seeing more features. We propose the first algorithm to compute this expected same-decision probability for general Bayesian network classifiers, based on compiling the network into a tractable circuit representation. Moreover, we develop a search algorithm for optimal feature selection that utilizes efficient incremental circuit modifications. Experiments on Naive Bayes, as well as more general networks, show the efficacy and distinct behavior of this decision-making approach.

Naive Bayesian network (NB) is a simple yet powerful Bayesian network. Even with a strong independency assumption among the features, it demonstrates competitive performance against other state-of-the-art classifiers, such as support vector machines (SVM). In this chapter, we propose a novel discriminative training approach originated from SVM for deriving the parameters of NB. This new model, called discriminative naive Bayesian network (DNB), combines both merits of discriminative methods (e.g., SVM) and Bayesian networks. We provide theoretic justifications, outline the algorithm, and perform a series of experiments on benchmark real-world datasets to demonstrate our model’s advantages. Its performance outperforms NB in classification tasks and outperforms SVM in handling missing information tasks.

To evaluate the performance of a within-project defect prediction approach, people normally use precision, recall, and F-measure scores. However, in machine learning literature, there are a large number of evaluation metrics to evaluate the performance of an algorithm, (e.g., Matthews Correlation Coefficient, G-means, etc.), and these metrics evaluate an approach from different aspects. In this paper, we investigate the performance of within-project defect prediction approaches on a large number of evaluation metrics. We choose 6 state-of-the-art approaches including naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression, kNN, random forest and Bayesian network which are widely used in defect prediction literature. And we evaluate these 6 approaches on 14 evaluation metrics (e.g., G-mean, F-measure, balance, MCC, J-coefficient, and AUC). Our goal is to explore a practical and sophisticated way for evaluating the prediction approaches comprehensively. We evaluate the performance of defect prediction approaches on 10 defect datasets from PROMISE repository. The results show that Bayesian network achieves a noteworthy performance. It achieves the best recall, FN-R, G-mean1 and balance on 9 out of the 10 datasets, and F-measure and J-coefficient on 7 out of the 10 datasets.

Digital soil maps can be used to depict the ability of soil to fulfill certain functions. Digital maps offer reliable information that can be used in spatial planning programs. Several broad types of data mining approaches through Digital Soil Mapping (DSM) have been tested. The usual approach is to select a model that produces the best validation statistics. However, instead of choosing the best model, it is possible to combine all models realizing their strengths and weaknesses. We applied seven different techniques for the prediction of soil classes based on 194 sites located in Isfahan region. The mapping exercise aims to produce a soil class map that can be used for better understanding and management of soil resources. The models used in this study include Multinomial Logistic Regression (MnLR), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Bayesian Networks (BN), and Sparse Multinomial Logistic Regression (SMnLR). Two ensemble models based on majority votes (Ensemble.1) and MnLR (Ensemble.2) were implemented for integrating the optimal aspects of the individual techniques. The overall accuracy (OA), Cohen's kappa coefficient index (κ) and the area under the curve (AUC) were calculated based on 10-fold-cross validation with 100 repeats at four soil taxonomic levels. The Ensemble.2 model was able to achieve larger OA, κ coefficient and AUC compared to the best performing individual model (i.e., RF). Results of the ensemble model showed a decreasing trend in OA from Order (0.90) to Subgroup (0.53). This was also the case for the κ statistic, which was the largest for the Order (0.66) and smallest for the Subgroup (0.43). Same decrease was observed for AUC from Order (0.81) to Subgroup (0.67). The improvement in κ was substantial (43 to 60%) at all soil taxonomic levels, except the Order level. We conclude that the application of the ensemble model using the MnLR was optimal, as it provided a highly accurate prediction for all soil taxonomic levels over and above the individual models. It also used information from all models, and thus this method can be recommended for improved soil class modelling. Soil maps created by this DSM approach showed soils that are prone to degradation and need to be carefully managed and conserved to avoid further land degradation.

Providing probability distributions for the causal pathogen of clinical mastitis using naive Bayesian networks