Data Mining with Graphical Models

The explosion of data stored in commercial or administra- tional databases calls for intelligent techniques to discover the patterns hidden in them and thus to exploit all available information. There- fore a new line of research has recently been established, which became known under the names "Data Mining" and "Knowledge Discovery in Databases". In this paper we study a popular technique from its arsenal of methods to do dependency analysis, namely learning inference net- works (also called "graphical models") from data. We review the already well-known probabilistic networks and provide an introduction to the recently developed and closely related possibilistic networks.