Subgroup Discovery Meets Bayesian Networks -- An Exceptional Model Mining Approach

Abstract

Whenever a dataset has multiple discrete target variables, we want our algorithms to consider not only the variables themselves, but also the interdependencies between them. We propose to use these interdependencies to quantify the quality of subgroups, by integrating Bayesian networks with the Exceptional Model Mining framework. Within this framework, candidate subgroups are generated. For each candidate, we fit a Bayesian network on the target variables. Then we compare the network’s structure to the structure of the Bayesian network fitted on the whole dataset. To perform this comparison, we define an edit distance-based distance metric that is appropriate for Bayesian networks. We show interesting subgroups that we experimentally found with our method on datasets from music theory, semantic scene classification, biology and zoogeography.