Independency relationships and learning algorithms for singly connected networks

Graphical structures such as Bayesian networks or Markov networks are very useful tools for representing irrelevance or independency relationships, and they may be used to efficiently perform reasoning tasks. Singly connected networks are important specific cases where there is no more than one undirected path connecting each pair of variables. The aim of this paper is to investigate the kind of properties that a dependency model must verify in order to be equivalent to a singly connected graph structure, as a way of driving automated discovery and construction of singly connected networks in data. The main results are the characterizations of those dependency models which are isomorphic to singly connected graphs (either via the d-separation criterion for directed acyclic graphs or via the separation criterion for undirected graphs), as well as the development of efficient algorithms for learning singly connected graph representations of dependency models.