Properties of Boolean functions on the hypercube invariant with respect to
linear transformations of the domain are among the most well-studied properties
in the context of property testing. In this paper, we study the fundamental
class of linear-invariant properties called matroid freeness properties. These
properties have been conjectured to essentially coincide with all testable
linear-invariant properties, and a recent sequence of works has established
testability for increasingly larger subclasses. One question left open,
however, is whether the infinitely many syntactically different properties
recently shown testable in fact correspond to new, semantically distinct ones.
This is a crucial issue since it has also been shown that there exist
subclasses of these properties for which an infinite set of syntactically
different representations collapse into one of a small, finite set of
properties, all previously known to be testable.
An important question is therefore to understand the semantics of matroid
freeness properties, and in particular when two syntactically different
properties are truly distinct. We shed light on this problem by developing a
method for determining the relation between two matroid freeness properties P
and Q. Furthermore, we show that there is a natural subclass of matroid
freeness properties such that for any two properties P and Q from this
subclass, a strong dichotomy must hold: either P is contained in Q or the two
properties are "well separated." As an application of this method, we exhibit
new, infinite hierarchies of testable matroid freeness properties such that at
each level of the hierarchy, there are functions that are far from all
functions lying in lower levels of the hierarchy. Our key technical tool is an
apparently new notion of maps between linear matroids, called matroid
homomorphisms, that might be of independent interest