Today’s Significance Magazine (the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association) has published an article by Anthony Constantinou and Norman Fenton that explains, through the use of an example from football management, the kind of assumptions required to build useful Bayesian networks (BNs) for complex decision-making. The article highlights the need to fuse data with expert knowledge, and describes the challenges in doing so. It also explains why, for fully optimised decision-making, extended versions of BNs, called Bayesian decision networks, are required.

The published pdf (open source) is also available here and here.

Full article details:

Constantinou, A., Fenton, N.E, “Things to know about Bayesian networks”, Significance, 15(2), 19-23 April 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2018.01126.x