Learning Bayesian networks based on bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization with mutation operator

The problem of structures learning in Bayesian networks is to discover a directed acyclic graph that in some sense is the best representation of the given database. Score-based learning algorithm is one of the important structure learning methods used to construct the Bayesian networks. These algorithms are implemented by using some heuristic search strategies to maximize the score of each candidate Bayesian network. In this paper, a bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization with mutation operator algorithm is proposed to learn Bayesian networks. The mutation strategy in proposed algorithm can efficiently prevent premature convergence and enhance the exploration capability of the population. We test the proposed algorithm on databases sampled from three well-known benchmark networks, and compare with other algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in learning Bayesian networks.