Bayesian network

High school (ages 12+)
Science & Technology

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/bayesian-network

1. What is the model paradigm?
2. What is the mathematical basis?
3. How does a Bayesian network help doctors find out what disease a patient might have?
4. Why do Bayesian networks use a directed acyclic graph?

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the model paradigm?Probabilistic graphical model representing conditional dependencies via a DAG
2. What is the mathematical basis?Encodes a joint probability distribution through conditional independence assumptions
3. How does a Bayesian network help doctors find out what disease a patient might have?It looks at the symptoms the patient shows and calculates the chance of each possible disease.
4. Why do Bayesian networks use a directed acyclic graph?The arrows show which things depend on others, and the graph can’t loop back on itself, keeping the math simple.

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG): A graph structure with nodes and directed edges that contains no cycles, representing dependencies.
Conditional Probability Distribution (CPD): The probability distribution of a variable given the values of its parent variables in the network.
Probabilistic Inference: The process of computing probabilities of unobserved variables based on observed evidence and the network structure.
Causal Discovery: The process of learning the causal structure of a system from observational data.