A BAYESIAN METANETWORK

Abstract

Bayesian network (BN) is known to be one of the most solid probabilistic modeling tools. The theory of BN provides already several useful modifications of a classical network. Among those there are context-enabled networks such as multilevel networks or recursive multinets, which can provide separate BN modelling for different combinations of contextual features' values. The main challenge of this paper is the multilevel probabilistic meta-model (Bayesian Metanetwork), which is an extension of traditional BN and modification of recursive multinets. It assumes that interoperability between component networks can be modeled by another BN. Bayesian Metanetwork is a set of BN, which are put on each other in such a way that conditional or unconditional probability distributions associated with nodes of every previous probabilistic network depend on probability distributions associated with nodes of the next network. We assume parameters (probability distributions) of a BN as random variables and allow conditional dependencies between these probabilities. Several cases of two-level Bayesian Metanetworks were presented, which consist on interrelated predictive and contextual BN models.