Some combinatorial properties of discriminants in metric vector spaces

If V is a metric vector space with bilinear form \({\mathcal B}\), and F is a finite set of vectors in V, the discriminant of \({\mathcal B}\) with respect to F is given by \(d_{{\mathcal B}}(F):=\det (({\mathcal B}(f,g))_{f,g\in F})\). If \({\mathcal B}\) is anisotropic on V and E is a finite subset of V, the set system \({\mathcal I}:=\{F\subseteq E| d_{{\mathcal B}}(F)\neq 0\}\) is clearly a matroid. In an arbitrary metric vector space, \({\mathcal I}\) may fail to be closed with respect to subsets. Nevertheless, these set systems retain many interesting properties, in particular: (i) if all subsets of E of cardinality n and \(n+1\) are not in \({\mathcal I}\), then no subset of cardinality exceeding \(n+1\) is in \({\mathcal I}\); (ii) if F and G are in \({\mathcal I}\) and the cardinality of F is less than that of G, F may be augmented to a set F' in \({\mathcal I}\) by the addition of at most elements from G; (iii) all maximal subsets in \({\mathcal I}\) have the same cardinality, and form the bases of a linearly representable matroid; (iv) if \(G\subseteq F\subseteq E\) and if F is contained in the linear span of G, then there exists some \(I\subseteq G\) with \(I\in {\mathcal I}\) such that the cardinality of I is {\#}I\(=\max \{\#I'| I'\subseteq F\) and I'\(\in {\mathcal I}\}.\) In this paper, we introduce a set of axioms for a new class of set systems called metroids, and show that these axioms assure that these and other essential properties of the set systems associated with metric vector spaces hold in metroids generally. It is further shown that another recent generalization of matroids known as bimatroids are a special class of metroids, although the converse is not true.

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