In a discrete Bayesian Network, the parameters are the conditional probability tables (CPTs).
Size of CPT grows exponentially with number of parents.
In educational models, CPTs should be monotonic: higher skill states should imply higher probability of success.
When learning CPTs from data, if skill variables are correlated certain combinations will be rare in data:
- Skill 1 is high and Skill 2 is low
- Skill 2 is low and Skill 1 is high
- This makes for low effective sample size (high standard errors) when estimating CPTs from data.