  We investigate approximating joint distributions of random processes with
causal dependence tree distributions. Such distributions are particularly
useful in providing parsimonious representation when there exists causal
dynamics among processes. By extending the results by Chow and Liu on
dependence tree approximations, we show that the best causal dependence tree
approximation is the one which maximizes the sum of directed informations on
its edges, where best is defined in terms of minimizing the KL-divergence
between the original and the approximate distribution. Moreover, we describe a
low-complexity algorithm to efficiently pick this approximate distribution.
