Construction of large-scale Bayesian networks by local to global search

Most existing algorithms for structural learning of Bayesian networks are suitable for constructing small-sized networks which consist of several tens of nodes. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the efficient and relatively-precise induction of large-scale Bayesian networks with up to several hundreds of nodes. The approach is based on the concept of Markov blanket and makes use of the divide-and-conquer principle. The proposed method has been evaluated on two benchmark datasets and a real-life DNA microarray data, demonstrating the ability to learn the large-scale Bayesian network structure efficiently