Acquisition of Causal Models for Local Distributions in Bayesian Networks

To specify a Bayesian network, a local distribution in the form of a conditional probability table, often of an effect conditioned on its n causes, needs to be acquired, one for each non-root node. Since the number of parameters to be assessed is generally exponential in n, improving the efficiency is an important concern in knowledge engineering. Non-impeding noisy-AND (NIN-AND) tree causal models reduce the number of parameters to being linear in n, while explicitly expressing both reinforcing and undermining interactions among causes. The key challenge in NIN-AND tree modeling is the acquisition of the NIN-AND tree structure. In this paper, we formulate a concise structure representation and an expressive causal interaction function of NIN-AND trees. Building on these representations, we propose two structural acquisition methods, which are applicable to both elicitation-based and machine learning-based acquisitions. Their accuracy is demonstrated through experimental evaluations.