A psychological approach to learning causal networks

We examine the role of a common cognitive heuristic in unsupervised learning of Bayesian probability networks from data. Human beings perceive a larger association between causal than diagnostic relationships. This psychological principal can be used to orient the arcs within Bayesian networks by prohibiting the direction that is less predictive. The heuristic increased predictive accuracy by an average of 0.51 % percent, a small amount. It …