Particle swarm optimization based method for Bayesian Network structure learning

Bayesian Networks (BNs) are good tools for representing knowledge and reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. In general, learning Bayesian Network structure from a data-set is considered a NP-hard problem, due to the search space complexity. A novel structure-learning method, based on PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and the K2 algorithm, is presented in this paper. To learn the structure of a bayesian network, PSO here is used for searching in the space of orderings. Then the fitness of each ordering is calculated by running the K2 algorithm and returning the score of the network consistent with it. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces better performance compared to others BN structure learning algorithms.