bnclassify: Learning Bayesian Network Classifiers

The bnclassify package provides state-of-the art algorithms for learning Bayesian network classifiers from data. For structure learning it provides variants of the greedy hill-climbing search, a well-known adaptation of the Chow-Liu algorithm and averaged one-dependence estimators. It provides Bayesian and maximum likelihood parameter estimation, as well as three naive-Bayes specific methods based on discriminative score optimization and Bayesian model averaging. The implementation is efficient enough to allow for time-consuming discriminative scores on medium sized data sets. The bnclassify package provides utilities for model evaluation, such as cross-validated accuracy and penalized log-likelihood scores, and analysis of the underlying networks, including network plotting via the Rgraphviz package. It is extensively tested, with over 200 automated tests that give a code coverage of 94%. Here we present the main functionalities, illustrate them with a number of data sets, and comment on related software.

Bojan Mihaljević , Concha Bielza , Pedro Larrañaga
2018-12-11

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2018-073.zip

CRAN packages used

bnlearn, bnclassify, caret, mlr, gRain, deal

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Bayesian, gR, HighPerformanceComputing, MachineLearning, Multivariate

Bioconductor packages used

Rgraphviz

Reuse

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Mihaljević, et al., "bnclassify: Learning Bayesian Network Classifiers", The R Journal, 2018

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2018-073,
  author = {Mihaljević, Bojan and Bielza, Concha and Larrañaga, Pedro},
  title = {bnclassify: Learning Bayesian Network Classifiers},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2018},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-073},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2018-073},
  volume = {10},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {455-468}
}