Following earlier work by Coons, Maraj, Misra and Sorea, and by Misra and
Sullivant, we study colored, undirected Gaussian graphical models, and present a
necessary and sufficient condition for such a model to have binomial vanishing ideal.
These conditions involve
Jordan schemes, a variant of
association schemes,
well-known structures in algebraic combinatorics. Using association schemes without
transitive group action, we refute the conjecture by Coons, Maraj, Misra and Sorea
that binomiality implies that the color classes must be orbits under the
automorphism group of the colored graph.
Keywords
colored Gaussian graphical models, binomial ideals, block
graphs, Jordan schemes