Earlier studies have shown that classification accuracies of Bayesian networks (BNs) obtained by maximizing the conditional log likelihood (CLL) of a class variable, given the feature variables, were higher than those obtained by maximizing the marginal likelihood (ML). However, differences between the performances of the two scores in the earlier studies may be attributed to the fact that they used approximate learning algorithms, not exact ones. This paper compares the classification accuracies of BNs with approximate learning using CLL to those with exact learning using ML. The results demonstrate that the classification accuracies of BNs obtained by maximizing the ML are higher than those obtained by maximizing the CLL for large data. However, the results also demonstrate that the classification accuracies of exact learning BNs using the ML are much worse than those of other methods when the sample size is small and the class variable has numerous parents. To resolve the problem, we propose an exact learning augmented naive Bayes classifier (ANB), which ensures a class variable with no parents. The proposed method is guaranteed to asymptotically estimate the identical class posterior to that of the exactly learned BN. Comparison experiments demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed method.

When applied to classification problems, Bayesian networks are often used to infer a class variable when given feature variables. Earlier reports have described that the classification accuracy of Bayesian network structures achieved by maximizing the marginal likelihood (ML) is lower than that achieved by maximizing the conditional log likelihood (CLL) of a class variable given the feature variables. Nevertheless, because ML has asymptotic consistency, the performance of Bayesian network structures achieved by maximizing ML is not necessarily worse than that achieved by maximizing CLL for large data. However, the error of learning structures by maximizing the ML becomes much larger for small sample sizes. That large error degrades the classification accuracy. As a method to resolve this shortcoming, model averaging has been proposed to marginalize the class variable posterior over all structures. However, the posterior standard error of each structure in the model averaging becomes large as the sample size becomes small; it subsequently degrades the classification accuracy. The main idea of this study is to improve the classification accuracy using subbagging, which is modified bagging using random sampling without replacement, to reduce the posterior standard error of each structure in model averaging. Moreover, to guarantee asymptotic consistency, we use the K-best method with the ML score. The experimentally obtained results demonstrate that our proposed method provides more accurate classification than earlier BNC methods and the other state-of-the-art ensemble methods do.