English

Fair representation by independent sets

Combinatorics 2016-11-11 v1

Abstract

For a hypergraph HH let β(H)\beta(H) denote the minimal number of edges from HH covering V(H)V(H). An edge SS of HH is said to represent {\em fairly} (resp. {\em almost fairly}) a partition (V1,V2,,Vm)(V_1,V_2, \ldots, V_m) of V(H)V(H) if SViViβ(H)|S\cap V_i|\ge \lfloor\frac{|V_i|}{\beta(H)}\rfloor (resp. SViViβ(H)1|S\cap V_i|\ge \lfloor\frac{|V_i|}{\beta(H)}\rfloor-1) for all imi \le m. In matroids any partition of V(H)V(H) can be represented fairly by some independent set. We look for classes of hypergraphs HH in which any partition of V(H)V(H) can be represented almost fairly by some edge. We show that this is true when HH is the set of independent sets in a path, and conjecture that it is true when HH is the set of matchings in Kn,nK_{n,n}. We prove that partitions of E(Kn,n)E(K_{n,n}) into three sets can be represented almost fairly. The methods of proofs are topological.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.03196,
  title  = {Fair representation by independent sets},
  author = {Ron Aharoni and Noga Alon and Eli Berger and Maria Chudnovsky and Dani Kotlar and Martin Loebl and Ran Ziv},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.03196},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:47:52.695Z