Visualizing and Inspecting Bayesian Belief Models

Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) have become accepted and used widely to model uncertain reasoning and causal relationships. We have developed an interactive visualization tool (VisNet) that allows students and/or teachers to inspect BBNs. Using VisNet it is possible to experiment with concepts such as marginal probability, changes in probability, probability propagation and cause-effect relationships in BBNs using visualization techniques. ViSMod (Visualization of Bayesian Student Models), an extended version of VisNet, opens the internal representation of the student’s knowledge to teachers and/or students interested in knowing more about the knowledge about them represented in the system. Both VisNet and ViSMod aim to support reflection processes in learning environments that rely on the use of Bayesian models.