Enumerating the decomposable neighbors of a decomposable graph under a simple perturbation scheme

Given a decomposable graph, we characterize and enumerate the set of pairs of vertices whose connection or disconnection results in a new graph that is also decomposable. We discuss the relevance of these results to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that sample or optimize over the space of decomposable graphical models according to probabilities determined by a posterior distribution given observed multivariate data. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved