597 research outputs found
Characteristic of partition-circuit matroid through approximation number
Rough set theory is a useful tool to deal with uncertain, granular and
incomplete knowledge in information systems. And it is based on equivalence
relations or partitions. Matroid theory is a structure that generalizes linear
independence in vector spaces, and has a variety of applications in many
fields. In this paper, we propose a new type of matroids, namely,
partition-circuit matroids, which are induced by partitions. Firstly, a
partition satisfies circuit axioms in matroid theory, then it can induce a
matroid which is called a partition-circuit matroid. A partition and an
equivalence relation on the same universe are one-to-one corresponding, then
some characteristics of partition-circuit matroids are studied through rough
sets. Secondly, similar to the upper approximation number which is proposed by
Wang and Zhu, we define the lower approximation number. Some characteristics of
partition-circuit matroids and the dual matroids of them are investigated
through the lower approximation number and the upper approximation number.Comment: 12 page
Covering matroid
In this paper, we propose a new type of matroids, namely covering matroids,
and investigate the connections with the second type of covering-based rough
sets and some existing special matroids. Firstly, as an extension of
partitions, coverings are more natural combinatorial objects and can sometimes
be more efficient to deal with problems in the real world. Through extending
partitions to coverings, we propose a new type of matroids called covering
matroids and prove them to be an extension of partition matroids. Secondly,
since some researchers have successfully applied partition matroids to
classical rough sets, we study the relationships between covering matroids and
covering-based rough sets which are an extension of classical rough sets.
Thirdly, in matroid theory, there are many special matroids, such as
transversal matroids, partition matroids, 2-circuit matroid and
partition-circuit matroids. The relationships among several special matroids
and covering matroids are studied.Comment: 15 page
Changing Bases: Multistage Optimization for Matroids and Matchings
This paper is motivated by the fact that many systems need to be maintained
continually while the underlying costs change over time. The challenge is to
continually maintain near-optimal solutions to the underlying optimization
problems, without creating too much churn in the solution itself. We model this
as a multistage combinatorial optimization problem where the input is a
sequence of cost functions (one for each time step); while we can change the
solution from step to step, we incur an additional cost for every such change.
We study the multistage matroid maintenance problem, where we need to maintain
a base of a matroid in each time step under the changing cost functions and
acquisition costs for adding new elements. The online version of this problem
generalizes online paging. E.g., given a graph, we need to maintain a spanning
tree at each step: we pay for the cost of the tree at time
, and also for the number of edges changed at
this step. Our main result is an -approximation, where is
the number of elements/edges and is the rank of the matroid. We also give
an approximation for the offline version of the problem. These
bounds hold when the acquisition costs are non-uniform, in which caseboth these
results are the best possible unless P=NP.
We also study the perfect matching version of the problem, where we must
maintain a perfect matching at each step under changing cost functions and
costs for adding new elements. Surprisingly, the hardness drastically
increases: for any constant , there is no
-approximation to the multistage matching maintenance
problem, even in the offline case
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