Survey of sparse structure learning of Bayesian networks

Sparse structure learning of Bayesian networks can simplify network structure without losing important information of the original network structure. In this paper, the necessity of the sparse structure learning of Bayesian networks and the definition of the sparsity of those are firstly discussed. Based on the general structure learning of Bayesian networks, the existing problems for high-dimensional data are analyzed, and then it is found that score-based structure learning is suitable for sparse structure learning. Therefore, the objective functions and their optimization algorithms are mainly described. Finally, some meaningful research trends are discussed.