Learning a Bayesian network (BN) from data can be useful for decision-making or discovering causal relationships. However, traditional methods often fail in modern applications, which exhibit a larger number of observed variables than data points. The resulting uncertainty about the underlying network as well as the desire to incorporate prior information recommend a Bayesian approach to learning the BN, but the highly combinatorial structure of BNs poses a striking challenge for inference. The current state-of-the-art methods such as order MCMC are faster than previous methods but prevent the use of many natural structural priors and still have running time exponential in the maximum indegree of the true directed acyclic graph (DAG) of the BN. We here propose an alternative posterior approximation based on the observation that, if we incorporate empirical conditional independence tests, we can focus on a high-probability DAG associated with each order of the vertices. We show that our method allows the desired flexibility in prior specification, removes timing dependence on the maximum indegree and yields provably good posterior approximations; in addition, we show that it achieves superior accuracy, scalability, and sampler mixing on several datasets.

本文提出一种基于条件独立性检验的后验逼近方法，用于学习贝叶斯网络。相比于先前的基于顺序 MCMC 的方法，该方法能够实现更佳的精度、可伸缩性和混合采样效果，同时允许使用更多自然的结构先验并消除了对最大入度的时间依赖性。

因果DAG模型中基于最小I-MAP的可扩展结构发现MCMC算法