Almost-Fisher families

A classic theorem in combinatorial design theory is Fisher's inequality, which states that a family $\mathcal F$ of subsets of $[n]$ with all pairwise intersections of size $\lambda$ can have at most $n$ non-empty sets. One may weaken the condition by requiring that for every set in $\mathcal F$, all but at most $k$ of its pairwise intersections have size $\lambda$. We call such families $k$-almost $\lambda$-Fisher. Vu was the first to study the maximum size of such families, proving that for $k=1$ the largest family has $2n-2$ sets, and characterising when equality is attained. We substantially refine his result, showing how the size of the maximum family depends on $\lambda$. In particular we prove that for small $\lambda$ one essentially recovers Fisher's bound. We also solve the next open case of $k=2$ and obtain the first non-trivial upper bound for general $k$.Comment: 27 pages (incluiding one appendix

Almost intersecting families

Let $n > k > 1$ be integers, $[n] = \{1, \ldots, n\}$. Let $\mathcal F$ be a family of $k$-subsets of~$[n]$. The family $\mathcal F$ is called intersecting if $F \cap F' \neq \emptyset$ for all $F, F' \in \mathcal F$. It is called almost intersecting if it is not intersecting but to every $F \in \mathcal F$ there is at most one $F'\in \mathcal F$ satisfying $F \cap F' = \emptyset$. Gerbner et al. proved that if $n \geq 2k + 2$ then $|\mathcal F| \leq {n - 1\choose k - 1}$ holds for almost intersecting families. The main result implies the considerably stronger and best possible bound $|\mathcal F| \leq {n - 1\choose k - 1} - {n - k - 1\choose k - 1} + 2$ for $n > (2 + o(1))k$