Towards standard imsets for maximal ancestral graphs

The imsets of \citet{studeny2006probabilistic} are an algebraic method for representing conditional independence models. They have many attractive properties when applied to such models, and they are particularly nice for working with directed acyclic graph (DAG) models. In particular, the `standard' imset for a DAG is in one-to-one correspondence with the independences it induces, and hence is a label for its Markov equivalence class. We first present a proposed extension to standard imsets for maximal ancestral graph (MAG) models, using the parameterizing set representation of \citet{hu2020faster}. We show that for many such graphs our proposed imset is \emph{perfectly Markovian} with respect to the graph, including \emph{simple} MAGs, as well as for a large class of purely bidirected models. Thus providing a scoring criteria by measuring the discrepancy for a list of independences that define the model; this gives an alternative to the usual BIC score that is much easier to compute. We also show that, of independence models that do represent the MAG, the one we give is the simplest possible, in a manner we make precise. Unfortunately, for some graphs the representation does not represent all the independences in the model, and in certain cases does not represent any at all. For these general MAGs, we refine the reduced ordered local Markov property \citep{richardlocalmarkov} by a novel graphical tool called \emph{power DAGs}, and this results in an imset that induces the correct model and which, under a mild condition, can be constructed in polynomial time.