Learning Moral Graphs in Construction of High-Dimensional Bayesian Networks for Mixed Data

Abstract

Bayesian networks have been widely used in many scientific fields for describing the conditional independence relationships for a large set of random variables. This letter proposes a novel algorithm, the so-called p-learning algorithm, for learning moral graphs for high-dimensional Bayesian networks. The moral graph is a Markov network representation of the Bayesian network and also the key to construction of the Bayesian network for constraint-based algorithms. The consistency of the p-learning algorithm is justified under the small-n, large-p scenario. The numerical results indicate that the p-learning algorithm significantly outperforms the existing ones, such as the PC, grow-shrink, incremental association, semi-interleaved hiton, hill-climbing, and max-min hill-climbing. Under the sparsity assumption, the p-learning algorithm has a computational complexity of O(p2) even in the worst case, while the existing algorithms have a computational complexity of O(p3) in the worst case.