An Incremental Formation Method of Influence Diagram Structure

As an effective decision tool, influence diagram has been widely used in many fields. However, its traditional building method needs experts or domain knowledge to identify the dependence relationship between variables in original dataset. When data set increased, its corresponding influence diagram might not suitable for it any more. A new influence diagram may need to be built from very beginning according to the traditional building method. An incremental formation method is developed in this paper, which could format the new influence diagram's structure by adjusting that of the original one. The validity of this method is discussed in theory and illustrated by experiment.