Explains the material step-by-step starting from meaningful examples Steps detailed with R code in the spirit of reproducible research Real world data analyses from a Science paper reproduced and explained in detail Examples span a variety of fields across social and life sciences Overview of available software in and outside R

Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide.

In recent years probabilistic graphical models, especially Bayesian networks and decision graphs, have experienced significant theoretical development within areas such as artificial intelligence and statistics. This carefully edited monograph is a compendium of the most recent advances in the area of probabilistic graphical models such as decision graphs, learning from data and inference. It presents a survey of the state of the art of specific topics of recent interest of Bayesian Networks, including approximate propagation, abductive inferences, decision graphs, and applications of influence. In addition, Advances in Bayesian Networks presents a careful selection of applications of probabilistic graphical models to various fields such as speech recognition, meteorology or information retrieval.

The application of Bayesian Networks (BN) or Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) in dependability and risk analysis is a recent development. A large number of scientific publications show the interest in the applications of BN in this field. Unfortunately, this modeling formalism is not fully accepted in the industry. The questions facing today's engineers are focused on the validity of BN models and the resulting estimates. Indeed, a BN model is not based on a specific semantic in dependability but offers a general formalism for modeling problems under uncertainty. This book explains the principles of knowledge structuration to ensure a valid BN and DBN model and illustrate the flexibility and efficiency of these representations in dependability, risk analysis and control of multi-state systems and dynamic systems. Across five chapters, the authors present several modeling methods and industrial applications are referenced for illustration in real industrial contexts.

Bayesian Networks in R with Applications in Systems Biology is unique as it introduces the reader to the essential concepts in Bayesian network modeling and inference in conjunction with examples in the open-source statistical environment R. The level of sophistication is also gradually increased across the chapters with exercises and solutions for enhanced understanding for hands-on experimentation of the theory and concepts. The application focuses on systems biology with emphasis on modeling pathways and signaling mechanisms from high-throughput molecular data. Bayesian networks have proven to be especially useful abstractions in this regard. Their usefulness is especially exemplified by their ability to discover new associations in addition to validating known ones across the molecules of interest. It is also expected that the prevalence of publicly available high-throughput biological data sets may encourage the audience to explore investigating novel paradigms using the approaches presented in the book.

Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics aims to provide students with insights and a guide explaining how to apply probabilistic reasoning to business problems. Rather than dwelling on rigor, algorithms, and proofs of theorems, the authors concentrate on showing examples and using the software package Netica to represent and solve problems. The book contains unique coverage of probabilistic reasoning topics applied to business problems, including marketing, banking, operations management, and finance. It shares insights about when and why probabilistic methods can and cannot be used effectively. This book is recommended for all R&D professionals and students who are involved with industrial informatics, that is, applying the methodologies of computer science and engineering to business or industry information. This includes computer science and other professionals in the data management and data mining field whose interests are business and marketing information in general, and who want to apply AI and probabilistic methods to their problems in order to better predict how well a product or service will do in a particular market, for instance. Typical fields where this technology is used are in advertising, venture capital decision making, operational risk measurement in any industry, credit scoring, and investment science. - Unique coverage of probabilistic reasoning topics applied to business problems, including marketing, banking, operations management, and finance - Shares insights about when and why probabilistic methods can and cannot be used effectively - Complete review of Bayesian networks and probabilistic methods for those IT professionals new to informatics.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Advanced Methodologies for Bayesian Networks, AMBN 2015, held in Yokohama, Japan, in November 2015. The 18 revised full papers and 6 invited abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In the International Workshop on Advanced Methodologies for Bayesian Networks (AMBN), the researchers explore methodologies for enhancing the effectiveness of graphical models including modeling, reasoning, model selection, logic-probability relations, and causality. The exploration of methodologies is complemented discussions of practical considerations for applying graphical models in real world settings, covering concerns like scalability, incremental learning, parallelization, and so on.