Refining a heuristic for constructing Bayesian networks from structured arguments

Abstract

Recently, a heuristic was proposed for constructing Bayesian networks (BNs) from structured arguments. This heuristic helps domain experts who are accustomed to argumentation to transform their reasoning into a BN and subsequently weigh their case evidence in a probabilistic manner. While the underlying undirected graph of the BN is automatically constructed by following the heuristic, the arc directions are to be set manually by a BN engineer in consultation with the domain expert. As the knowledge elicitation involved is known to be time-consuming, it is of value to (partly) automate this step. We propose a refinement of the heuristic to this end, which specifies the directions in which arcs are to be set given specific conditions on structured arguments.