Decomposition of Covariate-Dependent Graphical Models with Categorical Data

Graphical models are wildly used to describe conditional dependence relationships among interacting random variables.Among statistical inference problems of a graphical model,one particular interest is utilizing its interaction structure to reduce model complexity.As an important approach to utilizing structural information,decomposition allows a statistical inference problem to be divided into some sub-problems with lower complexities.In this paper,to investigate decomposition of covariate-dependent graphical models,we propose some useful definitions of decomposition of covariate-dependent graphical models with categorical data in the form of contingency tables.Based on such a decomposition,a covariate-dependent graphical model can be split into some sub-models,and the maximum likelihood estimation of this model can be factorized into the maximum likelihood estimations of the sub-models.Moreover,some sufficient and necessary conditions of the proposed definitions of decomposition are studied.