Generalized Permutohedra from Probabilistic Graphical Models

© 2018 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. A graphical model encodes conditional independence relations via the Markov properties. For an undirected graph these conditional independence relations can be represented by a simple polytope known as the graph associahedron, which can be const...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mohammadi, Fatemeh, Uhler, Caroline, Wang, Charles, Yu, Josephine
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Society for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (SIAM) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/135018
Description
Summary:© 2018 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. A graphical model encodes conditional independence relations via the Markov properties. For an undirected graph these conditional independence relations can be represented by a simple polytope known as the graph associahedron, which can be constructed as a Minkowski sum of standard simplices. There is an analogous polytope for conditional independence relations coming from a regular Gaussian model, and it can be defined using multiinformation or relative entropy. For directed acyclic graphical models and also for mixed graphical models containing undirected, directed, and bidirected edges, we give a construction of this polytope, up to equivalence of normal fans, as a Minkowski sum of matroid polytopes. Finally, we apply this geometric insight to construct a new ordering-based search algorithm for causal inference via directed acyclic graphical models.