Non-stationary continuous time Bayesian networks are introduced. They allow the parents set of each node to change over continuous time. Three settings are developed for learning non-stationary continuous time Bayesian networks from data: known transition times, known number of epochs and unknown number of epochs. A score function for each setting is derived and the corresponding learning algorithm is developed. A set of numerical experiments on synthetic data is used to compare the effectiveness of non-stationary continuous time Bayesian networks to that of non-stationary dynamic Bayesian networks. Furthermore, the performance achieved by non-stationary continuous time Bayesian networks is compared to that achieved by state-of-the-art algorithms on four real-world datasets, namely drosophila, saccharomyces cerevisiae, songbird and macroeconomics.
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