Geodesic property of greedy algorithms for optimization problems on jump systems and delta-matroids

Abstract

The concept of jump system, introduced by Bouchet and Cunningham (1995), is a set of integer points satisfying a certain exchange property. We consider the minimization of a separable convex function on a jump system. It is known that the problem can be solved by a greedy algorithm. In this paper, we are interested in whether the greedy algorithm has the geodesic property, which means that the trajectory of the solutions generated by the algorithm is a geodesic from the initial solution to a nearest optimal solution. We show that a special implementation of the greedy algorithm enjoys the geodesic property, while the original algorithm does not. As a corollary to this, we present a new greedy algorithm for linear optimization on a delta-matroid and show that the algorithm has the geodesic property.