if the DAG were simply two connected nodes 𝑋 and 𝑌 as in Figure 3.8, the local Markov assumption would tell us that we can factorize 𝑃(𝑥, 𝑦) as 𝑃(𝑥)𝑃(𝑦|𝑥) , but it would also allow us to factorize 𝑃(𝑥, 𝑦) as 𝑃(𝑥)𝑃(𝑦) , meaning it allows distributions where 𝑋 and 𝑌 are independent. In contrast, the minimality assumption does not allow this additional independence