Transformation and decomposition of clutters into matroids

A clutter is a family of mutually incomparable sets. The set of circuits of a matroid, its set of bases, and its set of hyperplanes are examples of clutters arising from matroids. In this paper we address the question of determining which are the matroidal clutters that best approximate an arbitrary...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Advances in mathematics (New York. 1965) Vol. 312; pp. 286 - 314
Main Authors: Martí-Farré, Jaume, de Mier, Anna
Format: Journal Article Publication
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Inc 25.05.2017
Subjects:
05 Combinatorics
05B Designs and configurations
05C Graph theory
Classificació AMS
Clutter
Combinatorial analysis
Combinatòria
Decomposition
Graph theory
Matemàtica discreta
Matemàtiques i estadística
Matroid
Poset
Teoria de grafs
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
05C65
Poset
05B35
Decomposition
Clutter
Matroid
ISSN:0001-8708, 1090-2082
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:A clutter is a family of mutually incomparable sets. The set of circuits of a matroid, its set of bases, and its set of hyperplanes are examples of clutters arising from matroids. In this paper we address the question of determining which are the matroidal clutters that best approximate an arbitrary clutter Λ. For this, we first define two orders under which to compare clutters, which give a total of four possibilities for approximating Λ (i.e., above or below with respect to each order); in fact, we actually consider the problem of approximating Λ with clutters from any collection of clutters Σ, not necessarily arising from matroids. We show that, under some mild conditions, there is a finite non-empty set of clutters from Σ that are the closest to Λ and, moreover, that Λ is uniquely determined by them, in the sense that it can be recovered using a suitable clutter operation. We then particularize these results to the case where Σ is a collection of matroidal clutters and give algorithmic procedures to compute these clutters.
ISSN:0001-8708
1090-2082
DOI:10.1016/j.aim.2017.03.022