In many areas, recent developments have generated very large datasets from which it is desired to extract meaningful relationships between the dataset elements. However, to date, the finding of such relationships using prior art methods has proved extremely difficult especially in the biomedical arts. Methods for local causal learning and Markov blanket discovery are important recent developments in pattern recognition and applied statistics, primarily because they offer a principled solution to the variable/feature selection problem and give insight about local causal structure. The present invention provides a generative method for learning local causal structure around target variables of interest in the form of direct causes/effects and Markov blankets applicable to very large datasets and relatively small samples. The method is readily applicable to real-world data, and the selected feature sets can be used for causal discovery and classification. The generative method GLL-PC can be instantiated in many ways, giving rise to novel method variants. In general, the inventive method transforms a dataset with many variables into either a minimal reduced dataset where all variables are needed for optimal prediction of the response variable or a dataset where all variables are direct causes and direct effects of the response variable. The power of the invention and significant advantages over the prior art were empirically demonstrated with datasets from a diversity of application domains (biology, medicine, economics, ecology, digit recognition, text categorization, and computational biology) and data generated by Bayesian networks.
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