Shapes and recession cones in mixed-integer convex representability

TL;DR

This paper explores the geometric properties of mixed-integer convex representable sets, revealing their complex structures and differences from mixed-integer linear representable sets, including examples of infinite unions with diverse recession cones and shapes.

Contribution

It provides new examples and theoretical insights into the structure of MICP-R sets, highlighting their differences from MILP-R sets in terms of recession cones and shapes.

Findings

MICP-R sets can be infinite unions with diverse recession cones.

MICP-R sets can be unions of polytopes with different shapes.

Infinite unions of convex sets with the same volume are limited to translations of a finite set.

Abstract

Mixed-integer convex representable (MICP-R) sets are those sets that can be represented exactly through a mixed-integer convex programming formulation. Following up on recent work by Lubin et al. (2017, 2020) we investigate structural geometric properties of MICP-R sets, which strongly differentiate them from the class of mixed-integer linear representable sets (MILP-R). First, we provide an example of an MICP-R set which is the countably infinite union of convex sets with countably infinitely many different recession cones. This is in sharp contrast with MILP-R sets which are at most infinite unions of polyhedra that share the same recession cone. Second, we provide an example of an MICP-R set which is the countably infinite union of polytopes all of which have different shapes (no pair is combinatorially equivalent, which implies they are not affine transformations of each other). Again, this is in sharp contrast with MILP-R sets which are at most infinite unions of polyhedra that are all translations of a finite subset of themselves. Interestingly, we show that a countably infinite union of convex sets sharing the same volume can be MICP-R only if the sets are all translations of a finite subset of themselves (i.e. the natural conceptual analogue to the MILP-R case).