208 research outputs found
The Salesman's Improved Tours for Fundamental Classes
Finding the exact integrality gap for the LP relaxation of the
metric Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been an open problem for over
thirty years, with little progress made. It is known that , and a famous conjecture states . For this problem,
essentially two "fundamental" classes of instances have been proposed. This
fundamental property means that in order to show that the integrality gap is at
most for all instances of metric TSP, it is sufficient to show it only
for the instances in the fundamental class. However, despite the importance and
the simplicity of such classes, no apparent effort has been deployed for
improving the integrality gap bounds for them. In this paper we take a natural
first step in this endeavour, and consider the -integer points of one such
class. We successfully improve the upper bound for the integrality gap from
to for a superclass of these points, as well as prove a lower
bound of for the superclass. Our methods involve innovative applications
of tools from combinatorial optimization which have the potential to be more
broadly applied
Even Delta-Matroids and the Complexity of Planar Boolean CSPs
The main result of this paper is a generalization of the classical blossom
algorithm for finding perfect matchings. Our algorithm can efficiently solve
Boolean CSPs where each variable appears in exactly two constraints (we call it
edge CSP) and all constraints are even -matroid relations (represented
by lists of tuples). As a consequence of this, we settle the complexity
classification of planar Boolean CSPs started by Dvorak and Kupec.
Using a reduction to even -matroids, we then extend the tractability
result to larger classes of -matroids that we call efficiently
coverable. It properly includes classes that were known to be tractable before,
namely co-independent, compact, local, linear and binary, with the following
caveat: we represent -matroids by lists of tuples, while the last two
use a representation by matrices. Since an matrix can represent
exponentially many tuples, our tractability result is not strictly stronger
than the known algorithm for linear and binary -matroids.Comment: 33 pages, 9 figure
Polynomials with the half-plane property and matroid theory
A polynomial f is said to have the half-plane property if there is an open
half-plane H, whose boundary contains the origin, such that f is non-zero
whenever all the variables are in H. This paper answers several open questions
regarding multivariate polynomials with the half-plane property and matroid
theory.
* We prove that the support of a multivariate polynomial with the half-plane
property is a jump system. This answers an open question posed by Choe, Oxley,
Sokal and Wagner and generalizes their recent result claiming that the same is
true whenever the polynomial is also homogeneous.
* We characterize multivariate multi-affine polynomial with real coefficients
that have the half-plane property (with respect to the upper half-plane) in
terms of inequalities. This is used to answer two open questions posed by Choe
and Wagner regarding strongly Rayleigh matroids.
* We prove that the Fano matroid is not the support of a polynomial with the
half-plane property. This is the first instance of a matroid which does not
appear as the support of a polynomial with the half-plane property and answers
a question posed by Choe et al.
We also discuss further directions and open problems.Comment: 17 pages. To appear in Adv. Mat
The Interlace Polynomial
In this paper, we survey results regarding the interlace polynomial of a
graph, connections to such graph polynomials as the Martin and Tutte
polynomials, and generalizations to the realms of isotropic systems and
delta-matroids.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, to appear as a chapter in: Graph Polynomials,
edited by M. Dehmer et al., CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group, LL
Binary matroids and local complementation
We introduce a binary matroid M(IAS(G)) associated with a looped simple graph
G. M(IAS(G)) classifies G up to local equivalence, and determines the
delta-matroid and isotropic system associated with G. Moreover, a parametrized
form of its Tutte polynomial yields the interlace polynomials of G.Comment: This article supersedes arXiv:1301.0293. v2: 26 pages, 2 figures. v3
- v5: 31 pages, 2 figures v6: Final prepublication versio
Discrete concavity and the half-plane property
Murota et al. have recently developed a theory of discrete convex analysis
which concerns M-convex functions on jump systems. We introduce here a family
of M-concave functions arising naturally from polynomials (over a field of
generalized Puiseux series) with prescribed non-vanishing properties. This
family contains several of the most studied M-concave functions in the
literature. In the language of tropical geometry we study the tropicalization
of the space of polynomials with the half-plane property, and show that it is
strictly contained in the space of M-concave functions. We also provide a short
proof of Speyer's hive theorem which he used to give a new proof of Horn's
conjecture on eigenvalues of sums of Hermitian matrices.Comment: 14 pages. The proof of Theorem 4 is corrected
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