Conditional Independence in Categories

1 pages•Published: July 28, 2014

Abstract

In this talk I shall discuss a general category-theoretic structure for modelling conditional independence. The standard notion of conditional independence in probability theory provides a motivating example. But other rather different examples arise in many contexts: computability theory, nominal sets (used to model `names' in computer science), separation logic (used to reason about heap memory in computer science), and others.

Category-theoretic structure common to these examples can be axiomatized by the notion of a category with local independent products, which combines fibrational and symmetric monoidal structure in a somewhat particular way. In the talk I shall expound this notion, and I shall present several illustrative examples of such structure. If time permits, I may also describe some curious connections with topos theory.

In: Nikolaos Galatos, Alexander Kurz and Constantine Tsinakis (editors). TACL 2013. Sixth International Conference on Topology, Algebra and Categories in Logic, vol 25, pages 9.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/MVJd
	https://doi.org/10.29007/tg3g

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{TACL2013:Conditional_Independence_Categories,
  author    = {Alex Simpson},
  title     = {Conditional Independence in Categories},
  booktitle = {TACL 2013. Sixth International Conference on Topology, Algebra and Categories in Logic},
  editor    = {Nikolaos Galatos and Alexander Kurz and Constantine Tsinakis},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {25},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/MVJd},
  doi       = {10.29007/tg3g},
  pages     = {9},
  year      = {2014}}

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