Algorithms for Large Scale Markov Blanket Discovery

May 2003

Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2003)

Volume

Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2003)

All Papers

This paper presents a number of new algorithms for discovering the Markov Blanket of a target variable T from training data. The Markov Blanket can be used for variable selection for classification, for causal discovery, and for Bayesian Network learning. We introduce a low-order polynomial algorithm and several variants that soundly induce the Markov Blanket under certain broad conditions in datasets with thousands of variables and compare them to other state-of-the-art local and global methods with excellent results.