Determination of Variables for a Bayesian Network and the Most Precious One.

To ensure the quality of a learned Bayesian network out of limited data sets, evaluation and selection process of variables becomes necessary. With this purpose, two new variable selection criteria N2Sj and N3Sj are proposed in this research which show superior performance on limited data sets. These newly developed variable selection criteria with the existing ones from prior research are employed to create Bayesian networks from three different limited data sets. On each step of variable elimination, the performance of the resulting BNs are evaluated in terms of different network performance metrics. Furthermore, a new variable evaluation criteria, IHj, is proposed which measures the impact of a variable to all the other variables in the network. IHj serves as an indicator of the most important variables in the network which has a special importance for the use of BNs in social science research, where it is crucial to identify the most important factors in a setting.