High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Variable-order Bayesian network models provide an important extension of both the Bayesian network models and the variable-order Markov models. Variable-order Bayesian network models are used in machine learning in general and have shown great potential in bioinformatics applications. These models extend the widely-used position weight matrix models, Markov models, and Bayesian network models. In contrast to the BN models, where each random variable depends on a fixed subset of random variables, in Variable-order Bayesian network models these subsets may vary based on the specific realization of observed variables. The observed realizations are often called the context and, hence, Variable-order Bayesian network models are also known as context-specific Bayesian networks. The flexibility in the definition of conditioning subsets of variables turns out to be a real advantage in classification and analysis applications, as the statisticaldependencies between random variables in a sequence of variables may be taken into account efficiently, and in a position-specific and context-specific manner.