How do you determine what the prior experience values should be?

[Anders L Madsen]

How do you determine what the prior experience values should be if you derive your prior CPTs directly from expert elicitation (and not from a dataset, in which case the prior experience values would correspond to the number of data points)?

The experience counts you give to expert knowledge determines the weight of the prior CPTs in the learning process.  For example, if you provide an experience count for a given parent configuration equal to the number of cases with that configuration, then the prior CPT and the distribution determined by the data (for that configuration) have equal weights.