Title: Learning the structure of Bayesian Networks: A quantitative assessment of the effect of different algorithmic schemes,
Abstract: One of the most challenging tasks when adopting Bayesian Networks (BNs) is
the one of learning their structure from data. This task is complicated by the
huge search space of possible solutions, and by the fact that the problem is
NP-hard. Hence, full enumeration of all the possible solutions is not always
feasible and approximations are often required. However, to the best of our
knowledge, a quantitative analysis of the performance and characteristics of
the different heuristics to solve this problem has never been done before.
For this reason, in this work, we provide a detailed comparison of many
different state-of-the-arts methods for structural learning on simulated data
considering both BNs with discrete and continuous variables, and with different
rates of noise in the data. In particular, we investigate the performance of
different widespread scores and algorithmic approaches proposed for the
inference and the statistical pitfalls within them.