BN Topic Model 中如何判断conditional independence p(x,y|z)

use the bayes ball method

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Bayes/bnintro.html

In general, the conditional independence relationships encoded by a Bayes Net are best be explained by means of the “Bayes Ball” algorithm (due to Ross Shachter), which is as follows: Two (sets of) nodes A and B are conditionally independent (d-separated) given a set C if and only if there is no way for a ball to get from A to B in the graph, where the allowable movements of the ball are shown below. Hidden nodes are nodes whose values are not known, and are depicted as unshaded; observed nodes (the ones we condition on) are shaded. The dotted arcs indicate direction of flow of the ball.

The most interesting case is the first column, when we have two arrows converging on a node X (so X is a “leaf” with two parents). If X is hidden, its parents are marginally independent, and hence the ball does not pass through (the ball being “turned around” is indicated by the curved arrows); but if X is observed, the parents become dependent, and the ball does pass through, because of the explaining away phenomenon. Notice that, if this graph was undirected, the child would always separate the parents; hence when converting a directed graph to an undirected graph, we must add links between “unmarried” parents who share a common child (i.e., “moralize” the graph) to prevent us reading off incorrect independence statements.

Now consider the second column in which we have two diverging arrows from X (so X is a “root”). If X is hidden, the children are dependent, because they have a hidden common cause, so the ball passes through. If X is observed, its children are rendered conditionally independent, so the ball does not pass through. Finally, consider the case in which we have one incoming and outgoing arrow to X. It is intuitive that the nodes upstream and downstream of X are dependent iff X is hidden, because conditioning on a node breaks the graph at that point.