ExpertBayes: Automatically refining manually built Bayesian networks

Abstract. Bayesian network structures are usually built using only the data and starting from an empty network or from a naı̈ve Bayes structure. Very often, in some domains, like medicine, a prior structure knowledge is already known. This structure can be automatically or manually refined in search for better perfor-mance models. In this work, we take Bayesian networks built by specialists and show that minor perturbations to this original network can yield better classifiers with a very small computational cost, while maintaining most of the intended meaning of the original model