“…BNs were introduced by Pearl (1986) to more easily deal with conditional dependency relationships between the (observable or unobservable) random variables of a statistical model, and they have been shown to have advantages to deal with inference, classification, and decision making problems (Aguilera et al, 2011). As a result, they are becoming increasingly popular in fields such as environmental science (Aguilera et al, 2011;Uusitalo, 2007), ecology (Landuyt et al, 2013), water resources management (Batchelor and Cain, 1999), and agriculture (Cain et al, 2003); and they have also been employed in geotechnical engineering (Huang et al, 2012;Jimenez-Rodriguez and Sitar, 2006;Medina-Cetina and Nadim, 2008;Peng et al, 2014;Schubert et al, 2012;Song et al, 2012;Sousa and Einstein, 2012;Špačková et al, 2013;Xu et al, 2011;Zazzaro et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2011).…”