An Empirical Study of the Use of the Noisy-Or Model in a Real-Life Bayesian Network

The use of the noisy-OR, model is advocated throughout the literature as an approach to lightening the task of obtaining all probabilities required for a Bayesian network. Little evidence is available, however, as to the effects of using the model on a. network's performance. In this paper, we construct a noisy-OR, version of a real-life hand-built Bayesian network of moderate size, and compare the performance of the original network with that of the constructed noisy-OR, version. Empirical results from using the two networks on real-life data show that the performance of the original network does not degrade by using the noisy-OR model.