Introduction

• A Bayesian Belief Network (BBN), or

simply Bayesian Network, is a statistical modelused
to describe the conditional dependencies between
different random variables.
• BBNs are chiefly used in areas like computational
biology and medicine for risk analysis and decision
support (basically, to understand what caused a
certain problem, or the probabilities of different
effects given an action).
 Structure of a Bayesian Network

The shown example, ‘Burglary-Alarm‘ is one of the most quoted ones in texts
on Bayesian theory. Lets look at the structural characteristics one by one. We
will delve into the numbers/tables later.
 The ‘Explain Away’ Effect

• The Explain Away effect, commonly associated with BBNs, is

a result of computing revised probabilities. It refers to the
phenomenon where knowing that one cause has occurred,
reduces (but does not eliminate) the probability that the
other cause(s) took place.
• If you are late for work and there was a traffic jam the
probality of waking up late resuces
• It is important to note that the probability for other causes
just gets reduced, but does NOT go down to zero.
• In a stroke of bad luck, it could have happened that
both wake up late and traffic jam could have occurred and
one has led to the late to work