Continuous valued attributes can then be handled by using mixture models. In effect, each mixture model converts a set of continuous valued inputs to a discrete number of probabilities for the component densities in the mixture model. Finally a query-reply system based on the Bayesian neural network is described. It constitutes a kind of expert system shell on top of the network. Rather than requiring all attributes to be given at once, the system can ask for the attributes relevant for the classification.
Information theory is used to select the attributes to ask for.
These extensions to the Bayesian neural network model are evaluated on a set of different databases, both realistic and synthetic, and the classification results are compared to those of various other classification methods on the same databases. The conclusion is that the Bayesian neural network model compares favorably to other methods for classification. In this work much inspiration has been taken from various branches of machine learning. The goal has been to combine the different ideas into one consistent and useful neural network model. A main theme throughout is to utilize independencies between attributes, to decrease the number of free parameters, and thus to increase the generalization capability of the method.