Path coverings with prescribed ends in faulty hypercubes

We discuss the existence of vertex disjoint path coverings with prescribed ends for the $n$-dimensional hypercube with or without deleted vertices. Depending on the type of the set of deleted vertices and desired properties of the path coverings we establish the minimal integer $m$ such that for every $n \ge m$ such path coverings exist. Using some of these results, for $k \le 4$, we prove Locke's conjecture that a hypercube with $k$ deleted vertices of each parity is Hamiltonian if $n \ge k +2.$ Some of our lemmas substantially generalize known results of I. Havel and T. Dvo\v{r}\'{a}k. At the end of the paper we formulate some conjectures supported by our results.Comment: 26 page

When Does a Mixture of Products Contain a Product of Mixtures?

We derive relations between theoretical properties of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), popular machine learning models which form the building blocks of deep learning models, and several natural notions from discrete mathematics and convex geometry. We give implications and equivalences relating RBM-representable probability distributions, perfectly reconstructible inputs, Hamming modes, zonotopes and zonosets, point configurations in hyperplane arrangements, linear threshold codes, and multi-covering numbers of hypercubes. As a motivating application, we prove results on the relative representational power of mixtures of product distributions and products of mixtures of pairs of product distributions (RBMs) that formally justify widely held intuitions about distributed representations. In particular, we show that a mixture of products requiring an exponentially larger number of parameters is needed to represent the probability distributions which can be obtained as products of mixtures.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, 2 table