Improving Naïve Bayes

• Naïve Bayes encodes assumptions of independence that may be unreasonable:

  Are pregnancy and age independent given diabetes?
  

Problem: same evidence may be incorporated multiple times

• The success of naïve Bayes is attributed to

  • Robust estimation
  • Decision may be correct even if probabilities are inaccurate

• Idea: improve on naïve Bayes by weakening the independence assumptions

  Bayesian networks provide the appropriate mathematical language for this task
  

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