BACKGROUND: The aim of this study was to provide a framework for the analysis of visceral obesity and its determinants in women, where complex inter-relationships are observed among lifestyle, nutritional and metabolic predictors. Thirty-four predictors related to lifestyle, adiposity, body fat distribution, blood lipids and adipocyte sizes have been considered as potential correlates of visceral obesity in women. To properly address the difficulties in managing such interactions given our limited sample of 150 women, bootstrapped Bayesian networks were constructed based on novel constraint-based learning methods that appeared recently in the statistical learning community. Statistical significance of edge strengths was evaluated and the less reliable edges were pruned to increase the network robustness. To allow accessible interpretation and integrate biological knowledge into the final network, several undirected edges were afterwards directed with physiological expertise according to relevant literature. RESULTS: Extensive experiments on synthetic data sampled from a known Bayesian network show that the algorithm, called Recursive Hybrid Parents and Children (RHPC), outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms that appeared in the recent literature. Regarding biological plausibility, we found that the inference results obtained with the proposed method were in excellent agreement with biological knowledge. For example, these analyses indicated that visceral adipose tissue accumulation is strongly related to blood lipid alterations independent of overall obesity level. CONCLUSIONS: Bayesian Networks are a useful tool for investigating and summarizing evidence when complex relationships exist among predictors, in particular, as in the case of multifactorial conditions like visceral obesity, when there is a concurrent incidence for several variables, interacting in a complex manner. The source code and the data sets used for the empirical tests are available at http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~aaussem/Software.html.

This paper introduces a novel conservative feature subset selection method with incomplete data sets. The method is conservative in the sense that it selects the minimal subset of features that renders the rest of the features independent of the target (the class variable) without making any assumption about the missing data mechanism. This is achieved in the context of determining the Markov blanket of the target that reflects the worst-case assumption about the missing data mechanism, including the case when data is not missing at random. An application of the method on synthetic incomplete data is carried out to illustrate its practical relevance. The method is compared against state-of-the-art approaches such as the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and the available case technique.