On data and probabilistic dependencies

Data dependencies have been extensively studied in relational databases as they play a key role in the normalization process. On the other hand, probabilistic reasoning systems would not be practical without the notion of probabilistic conditional independence. In this paper, we present a detailed comparison of these two types of (in)dependencies. While past research has shown that multivalued dependency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conditional independence, we show in particular that functional dependency is a sufficient but not necessary condition for conditional independence.