Semi-naive Exploitation of One-Dependence Estimators

It is well known that the key of Bayesian classifier learning is to balance the two important issues, that is, the exploration of attribute dependencies in high orders for ensuring a sufficient flexibility in approximating the ground-truth dependencies, and the exploration of low orders for ensuring a stable probability estimate from limited training samples. By allowing one-order attribute dependencies, one-dependence estimators (ODEs) have been shown to be able to approximate the ground-truth attribute dependencies whilst keeping the effectiveness of probability estimation, and therefore leading to excellent performance. In previous studies, however, ODEs were exploited in simple ways, such as by averaging, for classification. In this paper, we propose a semi-naive exploitation of ODEs that fits a function of ODEs to pursue higher-order attribute dependencies. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SNODE approach can achieve better performance than many state-of-the-art Bayesian classifiers.