Characterizations of Decomposable Dependency Models

Abstract

Decomposable dependency models possess a number of interesting and useful properties. This paper presents new characterizations of decomposable models in terms of independence relationships, which are obtained by adding a single axiom to the well-known set characterizing dependency models that are isomorphic to undirected graphs. We also briefly discuss a potential application of our results to the problem of learning graphical models from data.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file