s: Jan. 1992 -- Dec. 1994 ffl CTI: Current Technology Index Jan./Feb. 1993 -- Jan./Feb. 1994 ffl DAI: Dissertation Abstracts International: Vol. 53 No. 1 -- Vol. 55 No. 4 (1994) ffl EEA: Electrical & Electronics Abstracts: Jan. 1991 -- Dec. 1994 ffl P: Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings: Jan. 1986 -- Feb. 1995 (except Nov. 1994) ffl EI A: The Engineering Index Annual: 1987 -- 1992 ffl EI M: The Engineering Index Monthly: Jan. 1993 -- Dec. 1994 The following GA researchers have already kindly supplied their complete autobibliographies and/or proofread references to their papers: Dan Adler, Patrick Argos, Jarmo T. Alander, James E. Baker, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Ralf Bruns, I. L. Bukatova, Thomas Back, Yuval Davidor, Dipankar Dasgupta, Marco Dorigo, Bogdan Filipic, Terence C. Fogarty, David B. Fogel, Toshio Fukuda, Hugo de Garis, Robert C. Glen, David E. Goldberg, Martina Gorges-Schleuter, Jeffrey Horn, Aristides T. Hatjimihail, Mark J. Jakiela, Richard S. Judson, Akihiko Konaga...

In this paper we perform a comparison among FSS-EBNA, a randomized, populationbased and evolutionary algorithm, and two genetic and other two sequential search approaches in the well known Feature Subset Selection (FSS) problem. In FSS-EBNA, the FSS problem, stated as a search problem, uses the EBNA (Estimation of Bayesian Network Algorithm) search engine, an algorithm within the EDA (Estimation of Distribution Algorithm) approach. The EDA paradigm is born from the roots of the GA community in order to explicitly discover the relationships among the features of the problem and not disrupt them by genetic recombination operators. The EDA paradigm avoids the use of recombination operators and it guarantees the evolution of the population of solutions and the discovery of these relationships by the factorization of the probability distribution of best individuals in each generation of the search. In EBNA, this factorization is carried out by a Bayesian network induced by a chea...

Sparsity-promoting L1-regularization has recently been succesfully used to learn the structure of undirected graphical models. In this paper, we apply this technique to learn the structure of directed graphical models. Specifically, we make three contributions. First, we show how the decomposability of the MDL score, plus the ability to quickly compute entire regularization paths, allows us to efficiently pick the optimal regularization parameter on a per-node basis. Second, we show how to use L1 variable selection to select the Markov blanket, before a DAG search stage. Finally, we show how L1 variable selection can be used inside of an order search algorithm. The effectiveness of these L1-based approaches are compared to current state of the art methods on 10 datasets.

We propose a new scoring function for learning Bayesian networks from data using score search algorithms. This is based on the concept of mutual information and exploits some well-known properties of this measure in a novel way. Essentially, a statistical independence test based on the chi-square distribution, associated with the mutual information measure, together with a property of additive decomposition of this measure, are combined in order to measure the degree of interaction between each variable and its parent variables in the network. The result is a non-Bayesian scoring function called MIT (mutual information tests) which belongs to the family of scores based on information theory. The MIT score also represents a penalization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the joint probability distributions associated with a candidate network and with the available data set. Detailed results of a complete experimental evaluation of the proposed scoring function and its comparison with the well-known K2, BDeu and BIC/MDL scores are also presented.

In this paper we consider the optimal decomposition of Bayesian networks. More concretely, we examine -- empirically --, the applicability of genetic algorithms to the problem of the triangulation of moral graphs. This problem constitutes the only difficult step in the evidence propagation algorithm of Lauritzen and Spiegelhalter (1988) and is known to be NP-hard (Wen, 1991). We carry out experiments with distinct crossover and mutation operators and with different population sizes, mutation rates and selection biasses. The results are analyzed statistically. They turn out to improve the results obtained with most other known triangulation methods (Kjaerulff, 1990) and are comparable to the ones obtained with simulated annealing (Kjaerulff, 1990; Kjaerulff, 1992). Keywords: Bayesian networks, genetic algorithms, optimal decomposition, graph triangulation, moral graph, NP-hard problems, statistical analysis. 1 Introduction The Bayesian networks constitute a reasoning method based on p...

Abstract—Abductive inference in Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) is intended as the process of generating the most probable configurations given observed evidence. When we are interested only in a subset of the network’s variables, this problem is called partial abductive inference. Both problems are NP-hard and so exact computation is not always possible. In this paper, a genetic algorithm is used to perform partial abductive inference in BBNs. The main contribution is the introduction of new genetic operators designed specifically for this problem. By using these genetic operators, we try to take advantage of the calculations previously carried out, when a new individual is evaluated. The algorithm is tested using a widely used Bayesian network and a randomly generated one and then compared with a previous genetic algorithm based on classical genetic operators. From the experimental results, we conclude that the new genetic operators preserve the accuracy of the previous algorithm, and also reduce the number of operations performed during the evaluation of individuals. The performance of the genetic algorithm is, thus, improved. Index Terms—Abductive inference, bayesian belief networks, evolutionary computation, genetic operators, most probable explanation, probabilistic reasoning. I.

This paper shows how the Bayesian network paradigm can be used in order to solve combinatorial optimization problems. To do it some methods of structure learning from data and simulation of Bayesian networks are inserted inside Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA). EDA are a new tool for evolutionary computation in which populations of individuals are created by estimation and simulation of the joint probability distribution of the selected individuals. We propose new approaches to EDA for combinatorial optimization based on the theory of probabilistic graphical models. Experimental results are also presented.

Although many algorithms have been designed to construct Bayesian network structures using dierent approaches and principles, they all employ only two methods: those based on independence criteria, and those based on a scoring function and a search procedure (although some methods combine the two). Within the score+search paradigm, the dominant approach uses local search methods in the space of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where the usual choices for de ning the elementary modi cations (local changes) that can be applied are arc addition, arc deletion, and arc reversal. In this paper, we propose a new local search method that uses a dierent search space, and which takes account of the concept of equivalence between network structures: restricted acyclic partially directed graphs (RPDAGs). In this way, the number of dierent con gurations of the search space is reduced, thus improving eciency. Moreover, although the nal result must necessarily be a local optimum given the nature of the search method, the topology of the new search space, which avoids making early decisions about the directions of the arcs, may help to nd better local optima than those obtained by searching in the DAG space.

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are a quite recent topic in optimization techniques. They combine two technical disciplines of soft computing methodologies: probabilistic reasoning and evolutionary computing. Several algorithms and approaches have already been proposed by different authors, but up to now there are very few papers showing their potential and comparing them to other evolutionary computational methods and algorithms such as Genetic Algorithms (GAs). This paper focuses on the problem of inexact graph matching which is NP-hard and requires techniques to find an approximate acceptable solution. This problem arises when a non bijective correspondence is searched between two graphs. A typical instance of this problem corresponds to the case where graphs are used for structural pattern recognition in images. EDA algorithms are well suited for this type of problems.

In this work we introduce a methodology based on Genetic Algorithms for the automatic induction of Bayesian Networks from a file containing cases and variables related to the problem. The structure is learned by applying three different methods: The Cooper and Herskovits metric for a general Bayesian Network, the Markov Blanket approach and the relaxed Markov Blanket method. The methodologies are applied to the problem of predicting survival of people after one, three and five years of being diagnosed as having malignant skin melanoma. The accuracy of the obtained models, measured in terms of the percentage of well-classified subjects, is compared to that obtained by the so-called Naive-Bayes. In the four approaches, the estimation of the model accuracy is obtained from the 10-fold cross-validation method. Keywords- Bayesian Network, Genetic Algorithm, Structure Learning, Model Search, 10-fold Crossvalidation 1. Introduction Expert systems, one of the most developed areas in the fiel...