Impact of Bayesian network model structure on the accuracy of medical diagnostic systems

Abstract

While Bayesian network models may contain a handful of numerical parameters that are important for their quality, several empirical studies have confirmed that overall precision of their probabilities is not crucial. In this paper, we study the impact of the structure of a Bayesian network on the precision of medical diagnostic systems. We show that also the structure is not that important - diagnostic accuracy of several medical diagnostic models changes minimally when we subject their structures to such transformations as arc removal and arc reversal. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.