A class of statistical models to weaken independence in two-way contingency tables

In this paper we study a new class of statistical models for contingency tables. We define this class of models through a subset of the binomial equations of the classical independence model. We use some notions from Algebraic Statistics to compute their sufficient statistic, and to prove that they are log-linear. Moreover, we show how to compute maximum likelihood estimates and to perform exact inference through the Diaconis-Sturmfels algorithm. Examples show that these models can be useful in a wide range of applications.