ABC-Miner: An Ant-Based Bayesian Classification Algorithm

Bayesian networks (BNs) are powerful tools for knowledge representation and inference that encode (in)dependencies among random variables. A Bayesian network classifier is a special kind of these networks that aims to compute the posterior probability of each class given an instance of the attributes and predicts the class with the highest posterior probability. Since learning the optimal BN structure from a dataset is NP-hard, heuristic search algorithms need to be applied effectively to build high-quality networks. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, called ABC-Miner, for learning the structure of BN classifiers using the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. We describe all the elements necessary to tackle our learning problem using ACO, and experimentally compare the performance of our ant-based Bayesian classification algorithm with other algorithms for learning BN classifiers used in the literature.