bn.fit {bnlearn}R Documentation

Fit the parameters of a Bayesian network

Description

Fit, assign or replace the parameters of a Bayesian network conditional on its structure.

Usage

bn.fit(x, data, cluster, method, ..., keep.fitted = TRUE,
  debug = FALSE)
custom.fit(x, dist, ordinal, debug = FALSE)
bn.net(x)

Arguments

x

an object of class bn (for bn.fit() and custom.fit()) or an object of class bn.fit (for bn.net).

data

a data frame containing the variables in the model.

cluster

an optional cluster object from package parallel.

dist

a named list, with element for each node of x. See below.

method

a character string, see below for details.

...

additional arguments for the parameter estimation procedure, see below.

ordinal

a vector of character strings, the labels of the discrete nodes which should be saved as ordinal random variables (bn.fit.onode) instead of unordered factors (bn.fit.dnode).

keep.fitted

a boolean value. If TRUE, the object returned by bn.fit will contain fitted values and residuals for all Gaussian and conditional Gaussian nodes, and the configurations of the discrete parents for conditional Gaussian nodes.

debug

a boolean value. If TRUE a lot of debugging output is printed; otherwise the function is completely silent.

Details

bn.fit() fits the parameters of a Bayesian network given its structure and a data set; bn.net returns the structure underlying a fitted Bayesian network.

bn.fit() accepts data with missing values encoded as NA. If the parameter estimation method was not specifically designed to deal with incomplete data, bn.fit() uses locally complete observations to fit the parameters of each local distribution.

Available methods for discrete Bayesian networks are:

Available methods for hybrid Bayesian networks are:

Available methods for discrete Bayesian networks are:

Additional arguments for the bn.fit() function:

An in-place replacement method is available to change the parameters of each node in a bn.fit object; see the examples for discrete, continuous and hybrid networks below. For a discrete node (class bn.fit.dnode or bn.fit.onode), the new parameters must be in a table object. For a Gaussian node (class bn.fit.gnode), the new parameters can be defined either by an lm, glm or pensim object (the latter is from the penalized package) or in a list with elements named coef, sd and optionally fitted and resid. For a conditional Gaussian node (class bn.fit.cgnode), the new parameters can be defined by a list with elements named coef, sd and optionally fitted, resid and configs. In both cases coef should contain the new regression coefficients, sd the standard deviation of the residuals, fitted the fitted values and resid the residuals. configs should contain the configurations if the discrete parents of the conditional Gaussian node, stored as a factor.

custom.fit() takes a set of user-specified distributions and their parameters and uses them to build a bn.fit object. Its purpose is to specify a Bayesian network (complete with the parameters, not only the structure) using knowledge from experts in the field instead of learning it from a data set. The distributions must be passed to the function in a list, with elements named after the nodes of the network structure x. Each element of the list must be in one of the formats described above for in-place replacement.

Value

bn.fit() and custom.fit()returns an object of class bn.fit, bn.net() an object of class bn. See bn class and bn.fit class for details.

Note

Due to the way Bayesian networks are defined it is possible to estimate their parameters only if the network structure is completely directed (i.e. there are no undirected arcs). See set.arc and cextend for two ways of manually setting the direction of one or more arcs.

In the case of maximum likelihood estimators, bn.fit() produces NA parameter estimates for discrete and conditional Gaussian nodes when there are (discrete) parents configurations that are not observed in data. To avoid this either set replace.unidentifiable to TRUE or, in the case of discrete networks, use method = "bayes".

Author(s)

Marco Scutari

References

Azzimonti L, Corani G, Zaffalon M (2019). "Hierarchical Estimation of Parameters in Bayesian Networks". Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 137:67–91.

See Also

bn.fit utilities, bn.fit plots.

Examples

data(learning.test)

# learn the network structure.
cpdag = pc.stable(learning.test)
# set the direction of the only undirected arc, A - B.
dag = set.arc(cpdag, "A", "B")
# estimate the parameters of the Bayesian network.
fitted = bn.fit(dag, learning.test)
# replace the parameters of the node B.
new.cpt = matrix(c(0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.2, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.3, 0.1),
            byrow = TRUE, ncol = 3,
            dimnames = list(B = c("a", "b", "c"), A = c("a", "b", "c")))
fitted$B = as.table(new.cpt)
# the network structure is still the same.
all.equal(dag, bn.net(fitted))

# learn the network structure.
dag = hc(gaussian.test)
# estimate the parameters of the Bayesian network.
fitted = bn.fit(dag, gaussian.test)
# replace the parameters of the node F.
fitted$F = list(coef = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5), sd = 3)
# set again the original parameters
fitted$F = lm(F ~ A + D + E + G, data = gaussian.test)

# discrete Bayesian network from expert knowledge.
dag = model2network("[A][B][C|A:B]")
cptA = matrix(c(0.4, 0.6), ncol = 2, dimnames = list(NULL, c("LOW", "HIGH")))
cptB = matrix(c(0.8, 0.2), ncol = 2, dimnames = list(NULL, c("GOOD", "BAD")))
cptC = c(0.5, 0.5, 0.4, 0.6, 0.3, 0.7, 0.2, 0.8)
dim(cptC) = c(2, 2, 2)
dimnames(cptC) = list("C" = c("TRUE", "FALSE"), "A" =  c("LOW", "HIGH"),
                   "B" = c("GOOD", "BAD"))
cfit = custom.fit(dag, dist = list(A = cptA, B = cptB, C = cptC))
# for ordinal nodes it is nearly the same.
cfit = custom.fit(dag, dist = list(A = cptA, B = cptB, C = cptC),
         ordinal = c("A", "B"))

# Gaussian Bayesian network from expert knowledge.
distA = list(coef = c("(Intercept)" = 2), sd = 1)
distB = list(coef = c("(Intercept)" = 1), sd = 1.5)
distC = list(coef = c("(Intercept)" = 0.5, "A" = 0.75, "B" = 1.32), sd = 0.4)
cfit = custom.fit(dag, dist = list(A = distA, B = distB, C = distC))

# conditional Gaussian Bayesian network from expert knowledge.
cptA = matrix(c(0.4, 0.6), ncol = 2, dimnames = list(NULL, c("LOW", "HIGH")))
distB = list(coef = c("(Intercept)" = 1), sd = 1.5)
distC = list(coef = matrix(c(1.2, 2.3, 3.4, 4.5), ncol = 2,
               dimnames = list(c("(Intercept)", "B"), NULL)),
          sd = c(0.3, 0.6))
cgfit = custom.fit(dag, dist = list(A = cptA, B = distB, C = distC))

[Package bnlearn version 4.9.3 Index]