Characterizations of decomposable dependency models

Decomposable dependency models possess a number of interesting and useful proper-ties. This paper presents new characterizations of decomposable models in terms of in-dependence 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 brie y discuss a potential application of our results to the problem of learning graphical models from data. 1