Markov random fields and iterated toric fibre products (Q1745778)

The article under review studies the behavior of toric varieties under toric fibre products. The toric fibre product is an important operation (particularly in algebraic statistics) that was introduced by \textit{S. Sullivant} [J. Algebra 316, No. 2, 560--577 (2007; Zbl 1129.13030)]. In Conjecture 56 of [J. Symb. Comput. 74, 276--307 (2016; Zbl 1402.11121)], \textit{J. Rauh} and \textit{S. Sullivant} proposed that there may be a uniform bound on the Markov degree of arbitrary toric fiber products with finitely many different factors. Algebraically speaking, the Markov degree of a toric ideal \(I\) is the minimum, taken over all generating sets of \(I\), of the maximal degree in the generating set. In this paper the aforementioned conjecture of Sullivant and Rauh is proved in Theorem 7 and additionally linked to work in representation stability [\textit{S. Sam} and \textit{A. Snowden} J. Am. Math. Soc. 30, No. 1, 159--203 (2017; Zbl 1347.05010)]. The main results have a similar flavor to stabilization theorems for equations and syzygies of Veronese embeddings in [\textit{S. Sam}, Invent. Math. 207, No. 1, 1--21 (2017; Zbl 1362.14056); Math. Ann. 368, No. 3--4, 1095--1108 (2017; Zbl 1450.13005)]. The authors also prove an application to Markov random fields in Theorem 1. Theorems 1 and 7 follow from categorical theoretic considerations which are detailed in Sections 2 and 3.