Learning temporal nodes Bayesian networks Original Research Article

Temporal Nodes Bayesian Networks (TNBNs) are an alternative to Dynamic Bayesian Networks for temporal reasoning with much simpler and efficient models in some domains. TNBNs are composed of temporal nodes, temporal intervals, and probabilistic dependencies. However, methods for learning this type of models from data have not yet been developed. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm to obtain the structure and temporal intervals for TNBNs from data. The method consists of three phases: (i) obtain an initial approximation of the intervals, (ii) obtain a structure using a standard algorithm and (iii) refine the intervals for each temporal node based on a clustering algorithm. We evaluated the method with synthetic data from three different TNBNs of different sizes. Our method obtains the best score using a combined measure of interval quality and prediction accuracy, and a competitive structural quality with lower running times, compared to other related algorithms. We also present a real world application of the algorithm with data obtained from a combined cycle power plant in order to diagnose temporal faults.