  The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly
interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural
transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study
uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the
Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly
representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city's
architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the fa\c{c}ade design
of 68 old houses in Hanoi's Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from
248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics,
architecture and designs of the house fa\c{c}ade to find traces of cultural
evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French
colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth
technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic
dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of
which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house
fa\c{c}ade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian
Information criterion (BIC) scores and p<0.05, the variable for decorations
(DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for
Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using
Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models'
coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study
suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in social sciences in general and for
study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular.
