Adapting Bayes Network Structures to Non-stationary Domains

When an incremental structural learning method gradually modifies a Bayesian network (BN) structure to fit observations, as they are read from a database, we call the process structural adaptation. Structural adaptation is useful when the learner is set to work in an unknown environment, where a BN is to be gradually constructed as observations of the environment are made. Existing algorithms for incremental learning assume that the samples in the database have been drawn from a single underlying distribution. In this paper we relax this assumption, so that the underlying distribution can change during the sampling of the database. The method that we present can thus be used in unknown environments, where it is not even known whether the dynamics of the environment are stable. We briefly state formal correctness results for our method, and demonstrate its feasibility experimentally.