A Combinatorial Commutative Algebra Approach to Complete Decoding

Esta tesis pretende explorar el nexo de unión que existe entre la estructura algebraica de un código lineal y el proceso de descodificación completa. Sabemos que el proceso de descodificación completa para códigos lineales arbitrarios es NP-completo, incluso si se admite preprocesamiento de los datos. Nuestro objetivo es realizar un análisis algebraico del proceso de la descodificación, para ello asociamos diferentes estructuras matemáticas a ciertas familias de códigos. Desde el punto de vista computacional, nuestra descripción no proporciona un algoritmo eficiente pues nos enfrentamos a un problema de naturaleza NP. Sin embargo, proponemos algoritmos alternativos y nuevas técnicas que permiten relajar las condiciones del problema reduciendo los recursos de espacio y tiempo necesarios para manejar dicha estructura algebraica.Departamento de Algebra, Geometría y Topologí

Toric Ideals, Polytopes, and Convex Neural Codes

How does the brain encode the spatial structure of the external world? A partial answer comes through place cells, hippocampal neurons which become associated to approximately convex regions of the world known as their place fields. When an organism is in the place field of some place cell, that cell will fire at an increased rate. A neural code describes the set of firing patterns observed in a set of neurons in terms of which subsets fire together and which do not. If the neurons the code describes are place cells, then the neural code gives some information about the relationships between the place fields–for instance, two place fields intersect if and only if their associated place cells fire together. Since place fields are convex, we are interested in determining which neural codes can be realized with convex sets and in finding convex sets which generate a given neural code when taken as place fields. To this end, we study algebraic invariants associated to neural codes, such as neural ideals and toric ideals. We work with a special class of convex codes, known as inductively pierced codes, and seek to identify these codes through the Gröbner bases of their toric ideals

Minimal systems of binomial generators for the ideals of certain monomial curves

Let $a, b$ and $n > 1$ be three positive integers such that $a$ and $\sum_{j=0}^{n-1} b^j$ are relatively prime. In this paper, we prove that the toric ideal $I$ associated to the submonoid of $\mathbb{N}$ generated by $\{\sum_{j=0}^{n-1} b^j\} \cup \{\sum_{j=0}^{n-1} b^j + a\, \sum_{j=0}^{i-2} b^j \mid i = 2, \ldots, n\}$ is determinantal. Moreover, we prove that for $n > 3$, the ideal $I$ has a unique minimal system of generators if and only if $a < b-1$