Title: The neighborhood lattice for encoding partial correlations in a Hilbert space,
Abstract: Neighborhood regression has been a successful approach in graphical and
structural equation modeling, with applications to learning undirected and
directed graphical models. We extend these ideas by defining and studying an
algebraic structure called the neighborhood lattice based on a generalized
notion of neighborhood regression. We show that this algebraic structure has
the potential to provide an economic encoding of all conditional independence
statements in a Gaussian distribution (or conditional uncorrelatedness in
general), even in the cases where no graphical model exists that could
"perfectly" encode all such statements. We study the computational complexity
of computing these structures and show that under a sparsity assumption, they
can be computed in polynomial time, even in the absence of the assumption of
perfectness to a graph. On the other hand, assuming perfectness, we show how
these neighborhood lattices may be "graphically" computed using the separation
properties of the so-called partial correlation graph. We also draw connections
with directed acyclic graphical models and Bayesian networks. We derive these
results using an abstract generalization of partial uncorrelatedness, called
partial orthogonality, which allows us to use algebraic properties of
projection operators on Hilbert spaces to significantly simplify and extend
existing ideas and arguments. Consequently, our results apply to a wide range
of random objects and data structures, such as random vectors, data matrices,
and functions.