COMs: Complexes of Oriented Matroids

In his seminal 1983 paper, Jim Lawrence introduced lopsided sets and featured them as asymmetric counterparts of oriented matroids, both sharing the key property of strong elimination. Moreover, symmetry of faces holds in both structures as well as in the so-called affine oriented matroids. These two fundamental properties (formulated for covectors) together lead to the natural notion of "conditional oriented matroid" (abbreviated COM). These novel structures can be characterized in terms of three cocircuits axioms, generalizing the familiar characterization for oriented matroids. We describe a binary composition scheme by which every COM can successively be erected as a certain complex of oriented matroids, in essentially the same way as a lopsided set can be glued together from its maximal hypercube faces. A realizable COM is represented by a hyperplane arrangement restricted to an open convex set. Among these are the examples formed by linear extensions of ordered sets, generalizing the oriented matroids corresponding to the permutohedra. Relaxing realizability to local realizability, we capture a wider class of combinatorial objects: we show that non-positively curved Coxeter zonotopal complexes give rise to locally realizable COMs.Comment: 40 pages, 6 figures, (improved exposition

Universality theorems for inscribed polytopes and Delaunay triangulations

We prove that every primary basic semialgebraic set is homotopy equivalent to the set of inscribed realizations (up to M\"obius transformation) of a polytope. If the semialgebraic set is moreover open, then, in addition, we prove that (up to homotopy) it is a retract of the realization space of some inscribed neighborly (and simplicial) polytope. We also show that all algebraic extensions of $\mathbb{Q}$ are needed to coordinatize inscribed polytopes. These statements show that inscribed polytopes exhibit the Mn\"ev universality phenomenon. Via stereographic projections, these theorems have a direct translation to universality theorems for Delaunay subdivisions. In particular, our results imply that the realizability problem for Delaunay triangulations is polynomially equivalent to the existential theory of the reals.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

Generalized Permutohedra from Probabilistic Graphical Models

A graphical model encodes conditional independence relations via the Markov properties. For an undirected graph these conditional independence relations can be represented by a simple polytope known as the graph associahedron, which can be constructed as a Minkowski sum of standard simplices. There is an analogous polytope for conditional independence relations coming from a regular Gaussian model, and it can be defined using multiinformation or relative entropy. For directed acyclic graphical models and also for mixed graphical models containing undirected, directed and bidirected edges, we give a construction of this polytope, up to equivalence of normal fans, as a Minkowski sum of matroid polytopes. Finally, we apply this geometric insight to construct a new ordering-based search algorithm for causal inference via directed acyclic graphical models.Comment: Appendix B is expanded. Final version to appear in SIAM J. Discrete Mat

Topology of combinatorial differential manifolds

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42).by Laura Anderson.Ph.D

Characterisation of Spherical Splits

We investigate the properties of collections of linear bipartitions of points embedded into $\R^3$, which we call collections of affine splits. Our main concern is characterising the collections generated when the points are embedded into $S^2$; that is, when the collection of splits is spherical. We find that maximal systems of splits occur for points embedded in general position or general position in $S^2$ for affine and spherical splits, respectively. Furthermore, we explore the connection of such systems with oriented matroids and show that a maximal collection of spherical splits map to the topes of a uniform, acyclic oriented matroid of rank 4, which is a uniform matroid polytope. Additionally, we introduce the graphs associated with collections of splits and show that maximal collections of spherical splits induce maximal planar graphs and, hence, the simplicial 3-polytopes. Finally, we introduce some methodologies for generating either the hyperplanes corresponding to a split system on an arbitrary embedding of points through a linear programming approach or generating the polytope given an abstract system of splits by utilising the properties of matroid polytopes. Establishing a solid theory for understanding spherical split systems provides a basis for not only combinatorial–geometric investigations, but also the development of bioinformatic tools for investigating non-tree-like evolutionary histories in a three-dimensional manner