Mountain West Ruby Conference: SBN
16 March 2007
Carl Youngblood. Simple Bayesian Networks with Ruby.
How do we handle uncertainty? Probablilty theory.
How do we come up with probabilities? From experience, from beliefs — but either of these may not be accurate because of too few samples or skewed samples.
gem install sbn
The Ruby version is faster than his C++ version. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. — Donald Knuth
xmlbif – the format that the bayes network is stored to and read from. Compatible with the Java Bayes package. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network
He couldn’t get his SBN demonstration program working as expected. Sounds like SBN isn’t ready for prime time. Future improvements:
- Exact inference
- True continuous variables
- Etc.
http://www.pixelglow.com/macstl/
Q: Why not do this in R, and connect R to Ruby?
A: Good idea.
I think it would be cool if someone showed how to connect SBN into CruiseControl.rb to identify what patterns of development and which developers are most likely to break a build.