Physarum Learner: A bio-inspired way of learning structure from data

•A new bio-inspired optimization algorithm is presented.•It extends the Physarum Solver algorithm.•It learns Bayesian Network structure from data.•The algorithm’s performance is shown on artificial and real benchmark networks.

A novel Score-based Physarum Learner algorithm for learning Bayesian Network structure from data is introduced and shown to outperform common score based structure learning algorithms for some benchmark data sets. The Score-based Physarum Learner first initializes a fully connected Physarum-Maze with random conductances. In each Physarum Solver iteration, the source and sink nodes are changed randomly, and the conductances are updated. Connections exceeding a predefined conductance threshold are considered as Bayesian Network edges, and the score of the connected nodes are examined in both directions. A positive or negative feedback is given to the edge conductance based on the calculated scores. Due to randomness in selecting connections for evaluation, an ensemble of Score-based Physarum Learner is used to build the final Bayesian Network structure.