Representative set statements for delta-matroids and the Mader delta-matroid

TL;DR

This paper develops new representative set statements for linear delta-matroids, extending algebraic techniques to improve kernelization methods and applying them to achieve graph sparsification results for Mader networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel sieving polynomial approach for delta-matroids, generalizes the representative sets lemma, and applies these results to graph sparsification and Mader delta-matroids.

Findings

Established representative set statements for linear delta-matroids.

Derived an exact polynomial-time sparsification for Mader networks.

Proved Mader delta-matroids have linear representations.

Abstract

We present representative sets-style statements for linear delta-matroids, which are set systems that generalize matroids, with important connections to matching theory and graph embeddings. Furthermore, our proof uses a new approach of sieving polynomial families, which generalizes the linear algebra approach of the representative sets lemma to a setting of bounded-degree polynomials. The representative sets statements for linear delta-matroids then follow by analyzing the Pfaffian of the skew-symmetric matrix representing the delta-matroid. Applying the same framework to the determinant instead of the Pfaffian recovers the representative sets lemma for linear matroids. Altogether, this significantly extends the toolbox available for kernelization. As an application, we show an exact sparsification result for Mader networks: Let $G=(V,E)$ be a graph and $\mathcal{T}$ a partition of a set of terminals $T \subseteq V(G)$, $|T|=k$. A $\mathcal{T}$-path in $G$ is a path with endpoints in distinct parts of $\mathcal{T}$ and internal vertices disjoint from $T$. In polynomial time, we can derive a graph $G'=(V',E')$ with $T \subseteq V(G')$, such that for every subset $S \subseteq T$ there is a packing of $\mathcal{T}$-paths with endpoints $S$ in $G$ if and only if there is one in $G'$, and $|V(G')|=O(k^3)$. This generalizes the (undirected version of the) cut-covering lemma, which corresponds to the case that $\mathcal{T}$ contains only two blocks. To prove the Mader network sparsification result, we furthermore define the class of Mader delta-matroids, and show that they have linear representations. This should be of independent interest.