LEARNING BAYESIAN NETWORKS FOR REGRESSION FROM INCOMPLETE DATABASES*

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of inducing Bayesian network models for regression from incomplete databases. We use mixtures of truncated exponentials (MTEs) to represent the joint distribution in the induced networks. We consider two particular Bayesian network structures, the so-called na¨ıve Bayes and TAN, which have been successfully used as regression models when learning from complete data. We propose an iterative procedure for inducing the models, based on a variation of the data augmentation method in which the missing values of the explanatory variables are filled by simulating from their posterior distributions, while the missing values of the response variable are generated using the conditional expectation of the response given the explanatory variables. We also consider the refinement of the regression models by using variable selection and bias reduction. We illustrate through a set of experiments with various databases the performance of the proposed algorithms.