Lecture 17: Separation for Odd Cuts

Yesterday we reduced the separation problem for the matching polytope to the following problem:

given an undirected graph G, find a minimum cut (A,A')
such that A has odd cardinality,
and A does not contain the special vertex s.

We showed that if the weight of the edges crossing such a min-cut was strictly less than 1, then A would correspond to a violated constraint in the (exponentially-sized) LP. And one could find the min-cut (B, B') in the graph in polynomial time. But what if the side B not containing the special vertex s in this min-cut turned out to be of even cardinality? Well, It turns out we need a little more work.

To handle this, we do the following: first, we recurse on G/B (which is the graph obtained by shrinking the set B to a single node), and on G/B' obtained by shrinking B' to a single node. In the latter, we treat the new node obtained from shrinking B' as the "special" node.

Why would one of the two recursions succeed in finding a minimum odd cut? Suppose (A, A') was a minimum odd cut we were looking for (with s not in A). Recall that (B, B') was the mincut but B was even. And s is in neither of A or B,

• If A lay completely inside B or B', we'd find it in one of the recursive calls.
• If A contains B, we'd find it the recursive call on G/B.
  
• Suppose A intersects both B and B' but does not contain B. Then consider the 4 parts: A cap B, A cap B', A' cap B, and A' cap B'. |A| is odd, |B| is even. So either |A cap B| is odd, or |A cap B'| is odd.
  
  
  1. Say it's the former: |A cap B| is odd. A' cap B' contains s, so it's non-empty.
     
     Now we bust out the following fact (which is called submodularity of the cut function): if cut(X) is the weight of all edges going out of some set X,
     
     cut(X) + cut(Y) >= cut(X cap Y) + cut(X cup Y).
     
     
     So cut(A) + cut(B) >= cut(A cap B) + cut(A cup B) = cut(A cap B) + cut(A' cap B').
     
     cut(A) = min-odd-cut.
     cut(B) = min-cut.
     cut(A' cap B') >= min-cut, since A' cap B' is non-empty.
     cut(A cap B) >= min-odd-cut.
     
     Putting these together, the only way to satisfy submodularity is when we have equality everywhere. so cut(A cap B) = min-odd-cut, and we will find it recursively.
     
     
  2. If it's the latter: |A cap B'| is odd. Since A does not contain all of B, A' cap B is non-empty. Now apply submodularity to A and B', and repeat the same argument.
  
  This shows that at least one of the recursive calls to G/B or G/B' still has an odd-cut with the same value as cut(A), and hence we will find it recursively.
  

Finally, we need to bound the runtime of the entire procedure, but that can be bounded by poly(n).