  Many algorithms for inferring causality rely heavily on the faithfulness
assumption. The main justification for imposing this assumption is that the set
of unfaithful distributions has Lebesgue measure zero, since it can be seen as
a collection of hypersurfaces in a hypercube. However, due to sampling error
the faithfulness condition alone is not sufficient for statistical estimation,
and strong-faithfulness has been proposed and assumed to achieve uniform or
high-dimensional consistency. In contrast to the plain faithfulness assumption,
the set of distributions that is not strong-faithful has nonzero Lebesgue
measure and in fact, can be surprisingly large as we show in this paper. We
study the strong-faithfulness condition from a geometric and combinatorial
point of view and give upper and lower bounds on the Lebesgue measure of
strong-faithful distributions for various classes of directed acyclic graphs.
Our results imply fundamental limitations for the PC-algorithm and potentially
also for other algorithms based on partial correlation testing in the Gaussian
case.
