The UseR! workshop on Multivariate analysis using Additive Bayesian Networks is part of the useR! Conference which will take place online, from July 5 to July 9.

General information

When: July the 7th 2021

Where: Online

Requirements: Personal laptop. Basic statistics and basic knowledge of R. No prior knowledge about graph theory or Bayesian statistics is needed. Please follow the getting started checklist

Tutorial instructors: Gilles Kratzer & Reinhard Furrer & Nicolas Huber

Additive Bayesian Networks (ABN) have been developed to disentangle complex relationships of highly correlated datasets as frequently encountered in risk factor analysis studies. ABN is an efficient approach to sort out direct and indirect relationships among variables which is surprisingly common in systemic epidemiology. After the tutorial, you will run the particular steps within an ABN analysis with real-world data. You will be able to contrast this approach with standard regression (linear, logistic, Poisson regression, and multinomial models) used for classical risk factor analysis. Towards the end, we also cover Bayesian Model Averaging in the context of an ABN, which is useful to assess the validity of the learned model and more advanced inference on the network.

Learning outcomes

To understand the basic theory behind structure discovery and Additive Bayesian Networks modelling
To learn how to set up and interpret an Additive Bayesian Network model for multivariate analysis of animal health data using the R package abn
To consider possible synergies with other R package such as mcmcabn for further analysis

Schedule (Zurich time)

Time	Topic	Material
11:15 - 12:00	Brief theoretical introduction on Additive Bayesian modelling	Presentation
12:00 - 13:00	Hands-on exercises	Presentation / Hands-on exercises / Zip folder
13:00 - 13:20	Advanced ABN modelling	Presentation
13:20 - 13:40	Hands-on exercises on advanced features	Hands-on exercises / Zip folder
13:40 - 13:45	Wrap-up and discussions

More resources for abn are available at http://r-bayesian-networks.org/

Note: a previous version of this workshop (co presented with Arianna Comin) has been presented at the SVEPM workshop 2019. The material is available here

During the workshop, some questions were asked on slack channel. We create an FAQ. We hope that it could be usefull and that participants enjoyed the workshop.