Learning Binary Bayesian Networks in Polynomial Time and Sample Complexity

Adarsh Barik, Jean Honorio

Published 2018-03-12Version 1

We consider the problem of structure learning for binary Bayesian networks. Our approach is to recover the true parents and children for each node first and then combine the results to recover the skeleton. We do not assume any specific probability distribution for the nodes. Rather, we show that if the probability distribution satisfies certain conditions then we can exactly recover the parents and children of a node by performing l1-regularized linear regression with sufficient number of samples. The sample complexity of our proposed approach depends logarithmically on the number of nodes in the Bayesian network. Furthermore, our method runs in polynomial time.