A Note on Equivalence Classes of Directed Acyclic Independence Graphs

Directed acyclic independence graphs (DAIGs) play an important role in recent developments in probabilistic expert systems and influence diagrams (Chyu [1]). The purpose of this note is to show that DAIGs can usefully be grouped into equivalence classes where the members of a single class share identical Markov properties. These equivalence classes can be identified via a simple graphical criterion. This result is particularly relevant to model selection procedures for DAIGs (see, e.g., Cooper and Herskovits [2] and Madigan and Raftery [4]) because it reduces the problem of searching among possible orientations of a given graph to that of searching among the equivalence classes.