Pfaffian Pairs and Parities: Counting on Linear Matroid Intersection and Parity Problems

Abstract

Spanning trees are a representative example of linear matroid bases that are efficiently countable. Perfect matchings of Pfaffian bipartite graphs are a countable example of common bases of two matrices. Generalizing these two, Webb Counting Bases, Ph.D. thesis, University of Waterloo, 2004 introduced the notion of Pfaffian pairs as a pair of matrices for which counting of their common bases is tractable via the Cauchy--Binet formula. This paper studies counting on linear matroid problems extending Webb's work. We first introduce “Pfaffian parities” as an extension of Pfaffian pairs to the linear matroid parity problem, which is a common generalization of the linear matroid intersection problem and the matching problem. We show that a large number of efficiently countable discrete structures are interpretable as special cases of Pfaffian pairs and parities. Our study then turns to algorithmic aspects. We observe that the fastest randomized algorithms for the linear matroid intersection and parity problems by Harvey SIAM J. Comput., 39 (2009), pp. 679--702 and Cheung, Lau, and Leung ACM Trans. Algorithms, 10 (2014), pp. 1--26 can be derandomized for Pfaffian pairs and parities. We further present polynomial-time algorithms to count the number of minimum-weight solutions on weighted Pfaffian pairs and parities. Our algorithms make use of Frank's weight-splitting lemma for the weighted matroid intersection problem and the algebraic optimality criterion of the weighted linear matroid parity problem given by Iwata and Kobayashi SIAM J. Comput., 51 (2002) pp. STOC17-238--STOC17-280.