R: Simulate random samples from a given Bayesian network

rbn {bnlearn} | R Documentation

## Simulate random samples from a given Bayesian network

### Description

Simulate random samples from a given Bayesian network.

### Usage

    ## S3 method for class 'bn'
    rbn(x, n = 1, data, fit = "mle", ..., debug = FALSE)
    ## S3 method for class 'bn.fit'
    rbn(x, n = 1, ..., debug = FALSE)

### Arguments

`x` | an object of class `bn` or `bn.fit`.
`n` | a positive integer giving the number of observations to generate.
`data` | a data frame containing the data the Bayesian network was learned from.
`fit` | a character string, the label of the method used to fit the parameters of the newtork. See `bn.fit` for details.
`...` | additional arguments for the parameter estimation prcoedure, see again `bn.fit` for details.
`debug` | a boolean value. If `TRUE` a lot of debugging output is printed; otherwise the function is completely silent.

### Details

`rbn()` implements forward/logic sampling: values for the root nodes are sampled from their (unconditional) distribution, then those of their children conditional on the respective parent sets. This is done iteratively until values have been sampled for all nodes.

If `x` contains `NA` parameter estimates (because of unobserved discrete parents configurations in the data the parameters were learned from), `rbn` will produce samples that contain `NA`s when those parents configurations appear in the simulated samples. See `bn.fit` for details on how to make sure `bn.fit` objects contain no `NA` parameter estimates.

### Value

A data frame with the same structure (column names and data types) of the `data` argument (if `x` is an object of class `bn`) or with the same structure as the data originally used to to fit the parameters of the Bayesian network (if `x` is an object of class `bn.fit`).

### Author(s)

Marco Scutari

### References

Korb K, Nicholson AE (2010). Bayesian Artificial Intelligence. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2nd edition.

### See Also

`bn.boot`, `bn.cv`.

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    data(learning.test)
    res = hc(learning.test)
    par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
    plot(res)
    sim = rbn(res, 500, learning.test)
    plot(hc(sim))
    ## End(Not run)

[Package bnlearn version 4.7 Index]