Separations of Matroid Freeness Properties

Properties of Boolean functions on the hypercube invariant with respect to linear transformations of the domain are among the most well-studied properties in the context of property testing. In this paper, we study the fundamental class of linear-invariant properties called matroid freeness properties. These properties have been conjectured to essentially coincide with all testable linear-invariant properties, and a recent sequence of works has established testability for increasingly larger subclasses. One question left open, however, is whether the infinitely many syntactically different properties recently shown testable in fact correspond to new, semantically distinct ones. This is a crucial issue since it has also been shown that there exist subclasses of these properties for which an infinite set of syntactically different representations collapse into one of a small, finite set of properties, all previously known to be testable. An important question is therefore to understand the semantics of matroid freeness properties, and in particular when two syntactically different properties are truly distinct. We shed light on this problem by developing a method for determining the relation between two matroid freeness properties P and Q. Furthermore, we show that there is a natural subclass of matroid freeness properties such that for any two properties P and Q from this subclass, a strong dichotomy must hold: either P is contained in Q or the two properties are "well separated." As an application of this method, we exhibit new, infinite hierarchies of testable matroid freeness properties such that at each level of the hierarchy, there are functions that are far from all functions lying in lower levels of the hierarchy. Our key technical tool is an apparently new notion of maps between linear matroids, called matroid homomorphisms, that might be of independent interest

On the circuit-spectrum of binary matroids

AbstractMurty, in 1971, characterized the connected binary matroids with all circuits having the same size. We characterize the connected binary matroids with circuits of two different sizes, where the largest size is odd. As a consequence of this result we obtain both Murty’s result and other results on binary matroids with circuits of only two sizes. We also show that it will be difficult to complete the general case of this problem

Matroidal approaches to rough sets via closure operators

AbstractThis paper studies rough sets from the operator-oriented view by matroidal approaches. We firstly investigate some kinds of closure operators and conclude that the Pawlak upper approximation operator is just a topological and matroidal closure operator. Then we characterize the Pawlak upper approximation operator in terms of the closure operator in Pawlak matroids, which are first defined in this paper, and are generalized to fundamental matroids when partitions are generalized to coverings. A new covering-based rough set model is then proposed based on fundamental matroids and properties of this model are studied. Lastly, we refer to the abstract approximation space, whose original definition is modified to get a one-to-one correspondence between closure systems (operators) and concrete models of abstract approximation spaces. We finally examine the relations of four kinds of abstract approximation spaces, which correspond exactly to the relations of closure systems