Adjusting dependence relations for semi-lazy TAN classifiers

Abstract

The naive Bayesian classifier is a simple and effective classification method, which assumes a Bayesian network in which each attribute has the class label as its only one parent. But this assumption is not obviously hold in many real world domains. Tree-Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) is a state-of-the-art extension of the naive Bayes, which can express partial dependence relations among attributes. In this paper, we analyze the implementations of two different TAN classifiers and their tree structures. Experiments show how different dependence relations impact on accuracy of TAN classifiers. We present a kind of semi-lazy TAN classifier, which builds a TAN identical to the original TAN at training time, but adjusts the dependence relations for a new test instance at classification time. Our extensive experimental results show that this kind of semi-lazy classifier delivers lower error than the original TAN and is more efficient than Superparent TAN.