
Chapter 1 2
Learning Probabilistic
M odel Param eters
Until the early 1990s, the DAG in a Bayesian net work was ordinarily hand-
constructed by a domain expert. Then the conditional probabilities were as-
sessed b y the expert, learned from data, or obtained using a combination of
both techniques. Eliciting Bayesian networks from experts can be a laborious
and difficult process in the case of large networks. As a result, researchers
developed methods that could learn the DAG from data. Furthermore, they
formalized methods for learning the conditional probabilities from data. In a
Bayesian network, the conditional probability distributions are called the ...