Complete Graphical Characterization and Construction of Adjustment Sets in Markov Equivalence Classes of Ancestral Graphs

We present a graphical criterion for covariate adjustment that is sound and complete for four different classes of causal graphical models: directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), maximum ancestral graphs (MAGs), completed partially directed acyclic graphs (CPDAGs), and partial ancestral graphs (PAGs). Our criterion unifies covariate adjustment for a large set of graph classes. Moreover, we define an explicit set that satisfies our criterion, if there is any set that satisfies our criterion. We also give efficient algorithms for constructing all sets that fulfill our criterion, implemented in the R package dagitty. Finally, we discuss the relationship between our criterion and other criteria for adjustment, and we provide new soundness and completeness proofs for the adjustment criterion for DAGs.Comment: 58 pages, 12 figures, to appear in JML

Algorithmic Properties of Sparse Digraphs

The notions of bounded expansion [Nesetril and Ossona de Mendez, 2008] and nowhere denseness [Nesetril and Ossona de Mendez, 2011], introduced by Nesetril and Ossona de Mendez as structural measures for undirected graphs, have been applied very successfully in algorithmic graph theory. We study the corresponding notions of directed bounded expansion and nowhere crownfulness on directed graphs, introduced by Kreutzer and Tazari [Kreutzer and Tazari, 2012]. The classes of directed graphs having those properties are very general classes of sparse directed graphs, as they include, on one hand, all classes of directed graphs whose underlying undirected class has bounded expansion, such as planar, bounded-genus, and H-minor-free graphs, and on the other hand, they also contain classes whose underlying undirected class is not even nowhere dense. We show that many of the algorithmic tools that were developed for undirected bounded expansion classes can, with some care, also be applied in their directed counterparts, and thereby we highlight a rich algorithmic structure theory of directed bounded expansion and nowhere crownful classes

Graph quasivarieties

Introduced by C. R. Shallon in 1979, graph algebras establish a useful connection between graph theory and universal algebra. This makes it possible to investigate graph varieties and graph quasivarieties, i.e., classes of graphs described by identities or quasi-identities. In this paper, graph quasivarieties are characterized as classes of graphs closed under directed unions of isomorphic copies of finite strong pointed subproducts.Comment: 15 page

The algebra of adjacency patterns: Rees matrix semigroups with reversion

We establish a surprisingly close relationship between universal Horn classes of directed graphs and varieties generated by so-called adjacency semigroups which are Rees matrix semigroups over the trivial group with the unary operation of reversion. In particular, the lattice of subvarieties of the variety generated by adjacency semigroups that are regular unary semigroups is essentially the same as the lattice of universal Horn classes of reflexive directed graphs. A number of examples follow, including a limit variety of regular unary semigroups and finite unary semigroups with NP-hard variety membership problems.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure

Structural Properties and Constant Factor-Approximation of Strong Distance-r Dominating Sets in Sparse Directed Graphs

Bounded expansion and nowhere dense graph classes, introduced by Nesetril and Ossona de Mendez, form a large variety of classes of uniformly sparse graphs which includes the class of planar graphs, actually all classes with excluded minors, and also bounded degree graphs. Since their initial definition it was shown that these graph classes can be defined in many equivalent ways: by generalised colouring numbers, neighbourhood complexity, sparse neighbourhood covers, a game known as the splitter game, and many more. We study the corresponding concepts for directed graphs. We show that the densities of bounded depth directed minors and bounded depth topological minors relate in a similar way as in the undirected case. We provide a characterisation of bounded expansion classes by a directed version of the generalised colouring numbers. As an application we show how to construct sparse directed neighbourhood covers and how to approximate directed distance-r dominating sets on classes of bounded expansion. On the other hand, we show that linear neighbourhood complexity does not characterise directed classes of bounded expansion