Selfadhesivity in Gaussian conditional independence structures

Abstract

Selfadhesivity is a property of entropic polymatroids which guarantees that the polymatroid can be glued to an identical copy of itself along arbitrary restrictions such that the two pieces are independent given the common restriction. We show that positive definite matrices satisfy this condition as well and examine consequences for Gaussian conditional independence structures. New axioms of Gaussian CI are obtained by applying selfadhesivity to the previously known axioms of structural semigraphoids and orientable gaussoids.