Tropical Carath\'eodory with Matroids

TL;DR

This paper extends colorful Carathéodory theorems to tropical convexity, incorporating matroid constraints, and explores computational complexity and potential generalizations in this new setting.

Contribution

It introduces tropical matroid colorful Carathéodory theorems, providing geometric proofs and analyzing the NP-completeness of related tropical linear programming.

Findings

Tropical colorful Carathéodory theorem generalization

Tropical colorful linear programming is NP-complete

Topological methods do not apply in this tropical matroid setting

Abstract

B\'ar\'any's colorful generalization of Carath\'eodory's Theorem combines geometrical and combinatorial constraints. Kalai-Meshulam (2005) and Holmsen (2016) generalized B\'ar\'any's theorem by replacing color classes with matroid constraints. In this note, we obtain corresponding results in tropical convexity, generalizing the tropical colorful Carath\'eodory Theorem of Gaubert-Meunier (2010). Our proof is inspired by geometric arguments and is reminiscent of matroid intersection. In particular, we show that the topological approach fails in this setting. We also discuss tropical colorful linear programming and show that it is NP-complete. We end with thoughts and questions on generalizations to polymatroids, anti-matroids as well as examples and matroid simplicial depth.