Sunday, March 15, 2009

Unmasking the Beard

I trained my Bayesian Network modeling skills with a sportsbetting fraud. We call it a beard, when a professional is masking his insider abuse by placing his bets with help of an acquaintance. It will be in nearly all cases a relative or a friend. How can we imply from evidence of surname to being relative? And then from being relative to being "beard?" Or: how can we imply friendship, and then beard?
The naive model presented shows reasonable behaviour.
First the presentation of the marginal probalilities (the numbers) and the inference sensitivity (red boxes) of nodes
Being a beard can only happen if there is a pro to mask. So this evidence remains set. Friends and relatives highly influence the other nodes because of their outgoing edges and their prior conditional probabilities. Interestingly being from same district has also a high impact because its relatively rare measured within a nation. We see, being from the same district increases beard probability +3% in this model:



Download and play it with GeNie.

A screencast:

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