Decomposing 1-Sperner hypergraphs

A hypergraph is Sperner if no hyperedge contains another one. A Sperner hypergraph is equilizable (resp., threshold) if the characteristic vectors of its hyperedges are the (minimal) binary solutions to a linear equation (resp., inequality) with positive coefficients. These combinatorial notions have many applications and are motivated by the theory of Boolean functions and integer programming. We introduce in this paper the class of $1$-Sperner hypergraphs, defined by the property that for every two hyperedges the smallest of their two set differences is of size one. We characterize this class of Sperner hypergraphs by a decomposition theorem and derive several consequences from it. In particular, we obtain bounds on the size of $1$-Sperner hypergraphs and their transversal hypergraphs, show that the characteristic vectors of the hyperedges are linearly independent over the reals, and prove that $1$-Sperner hypergraphs are both threshold and equilizable. The study of $1$-Sperner hypergraphs is motivated also by their applications in graph theory, which we present in a companion paper

On LL-close Sperner systems

For a set $L$ of positive integers, a set system $\mathcal{F} \subseteq 2^{[n]}$ is said to be $L$-close Sperner, if for any pair $F,G$ of distinct sets in $\mathcal{F}$ the skew distance $sd(F,G)=\min\{|F\setminus G|,|G\setminus F|\}$ belongs to $L$. We reprove an extremal result of Boros, Gurvich, and Milani\v c on the maximum size of $L$-close Sperner set systems for $L=\{1\}$ and generalize to $|L|=1$ and obtain slightly weaker bounds for arbitrary $L$. We also consider the problem when $L$ might include 0 and reprove a theorem of Frankl, F\"uredi, and Pach on the size of largest set systems with all skew distances belonging to $L=\{0,1\}$

Sperner systems with restricted differences

Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of subsets of $[n]$ and $L$ be a subset of $[n]$. We say $\mathcal{F}$ is an $L$-differencing Sperner system if $|A\setminus B|\in L$ for any distinct $A,B\in\mathcal{F}$. Let $p$ be a prime and $q$ be a power of $p$. Frankl first studied $p$-modular $L$-differencing Sperner systems and showed an upper bound of the form $\sum_{i=0}^{|L|}\binom{n}{i}$. In this paper, we obtain new upper bounds on $q$-modular $L$-differencing Sperner systems using elementary $p$-adic analysis and polynomial method, extending and improving existing results substantially. Moreover, our techniques can be used to derive new upper bounds on subsets of the hypercube with restricted Hamming distances. One highlight of the paper is the first analogue of the celebrated Snevily's theorem in the $q$-modular setting, which results in several new upper bounds on $q$-modular $L$-avoiding $L$-intersecting systems. In particular, we improve a result of Felszeghy, Heged\H{u}s, and R\'{o}nyai, and give a partial answer to a question posed by Babai, Frankl, Kutin, and \v{S}tefankovi\v{c}.Comment: 22 pages, results in table 1 and section 6.1 improve