696 research outputs found
Combinatorics and Geometry of Transportation Polytopes: An Update
A transportation polytope consists of all multidimensional arrays or tables
of non-negative real numbers that satisfy certain sum conditions on subsets of
the entries. They arise naturally in optimization and statistics, and also have
interest for discrete mathematics because permutation matrices, latin squares,
and magic squares appear naturally as lattice points of these polytopes.
In this paper we survey advances on the understanding of the combinatorics
and geometry of these polyhedra and include some recent unpublished results on
the diameter of graphs of these polytopes. In particular, this is a thirty-year
update on the status of a list of open questions last visited in the 1984 book
by Yemelichev, Kovalev and Kravtsov and the 1986 survey paper of Vlach.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure
Faces of Birkhoff Polytopes
The Birkhoff polytope B(n) is the convex hull of all (n x n) permutation
matrices, i.e., matrices where precisely one entry in each row and column is
one, and zeros at all other places. This is a widely studied polytope with
various applications throughout mathematics.
In this paper we study combinatorial types L of faces of a Birkhoff polytope.
The Birkhoff dimension bd(L) of L is the smallest n such that B(n) has a face
with combinatorial type L.
By a result of Billera and Sarangarajan, a combinatorial type L of a
d-dimensional face appears in some B(k) for k less or equal to 2d, so bd(L) is
at most d. We will characterize those types whose Birkhoff dimension is at
least 2d-3, and we prove that any type whose Birkhoff dimension is at least d
is either a product or a wedge over some lower dimensional face. Further, we
computationally classify all d-dimensional combinatorial types for d between 2
and 8.Comment: 29 page
Magic graphs and the faces of the Birkhoff polytope
Magic labelings of graphs are studied in great detail by Stanley and Stewart.
In this article, we construct and enumerate magic labelings of graphs using
Hilbert bases of polyhedral cones and Ehrhart quasi-polynomials of polytopes.
We define polytopes of magic labelings of graphs and digraphs. We give a
description of the faces of the Birkhoff polytope as polytopes of magic
labelings of digraphs.Comment: 9 page
Reparameterizing the Birkhoff Polytope for Variational Permutation Inference
Many matching, tracking, sorting, and ranking problems require probabilistic
reasoning about possible permutations, a set that grows factorially with
dimension. Combinatorial optimization algorithms may enable efficient point
estimation, but fully Bayesian inference poses a severe challenge in this
high-dimensional, discrete space. To surmount this challenge, we start with the
usual step of relaxing a discrete set (here, of permutation matrices) to its
convex hull, which here is the Birkhoff polytope: the set of all
doubly-stochastic matrices. We then introduce two novel transformations: first,
an invertible and differentiable stick-breaking procedure that maps
unconstrained space to the Birkhoff polytope; second, a map that rounds points
toward the vertices of the polytope. Both transformations include a temperature
parameter that, in the limit, concentrates the densities on permutation
matrices. We then exploit these transformations and reparameterization
gradients to introduce variational inference over permutation matrices, and we
demonstrate its utility in a series of experiments
The boundary volume of a lattice polytope
For a d-dimensional convex lattice polytope P, a formula for the boundary
volume is derived in terms of the number of boundary lattice points on the
first \floor{d/2} dilations of P. As an application we give a necessary and
sufficient condition for a polytope to be reflexive, and derive formulae for
the f-vector of a smooth polytope in dimensions 3, 4, and 5. We also give
applications to reflexive order polytopes, and to the Birkhoff polytope.Comment: 21 pages; subsumes arXiv:1002.1908 [math.CO]; to appear in the
Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Societ
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