A Decomposition Algorithm for Learning Bayesian Network Structures from Data

It is a challenging task of learning a large Bayesian network from a small data set. Most conventional structural learning approaches run into the computational as well as the statistical problems. We propose a decomposition algorithm for the structure construction without having to learn the complete network. The new learning algorithm firstly finds local components from the data, and then recover the complete network by joining the learned components. We show the empirical performance of the decomposition algorithm in several benchmark networks.