Quantitative fractional Helly and (p,q)-theorems

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Quantitative fractional Helly and \((p,q)\)-theorems



Abstract: We consider quantitative versions of Helly-type questions, that is, instead of finding a point in the intersection, we bound the volume of the intersection. Our first main geometric result is a quantitative version of the Fractional Helly Theorem of Katchalski and Liu, the second one is a quantitative version of the (p,q)-Theorem of Alon and Kleitman.


The classical Helly theorem states that the intersection of all members of a finite collection \(\mathcal{C}\) of convex sets in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) is non-empty if the intersection of any \(d+1\) of the members is non-empty. A ``quantiative version of the theorem states that, if any \(2d\) of the convex sets contain an ellipsoid of volume at least one, then the intersection of all the convex sets contains an ellipsoid of volume at least \(c^d d^{-3d/2}\). Here \(c>0\) is a universal constant. The main two results of the present paper give quantitative versions of ``\((p,q)\) and ``fractional variants of Helly's theorem, which are well-studied topics in their own right. For example, Theorem 1.3 shows that for any \(\alpha\in (0,1)\), there is a corresponding \(\beta\in (0,1)\) such that the following holds: Suppose that among all subfamilies of \(\mathcal{C}\) of size \(3d+1\), there are at least \(\alpha \binom{|\mathcal{C}|}{3d+1}\) for which the intersection of the \(3d+1\) members contains an ellipsoid of volume one. Then \(\mathcal{C}\) has a subfamily \(\mathcal{C}'\) of size at least \(\beta|\mathcal{C}|\) such that the intersection of all members of \(\mathcal{C}'\) contains an ellipsoid of volume at least \(c^{d^2}d^{-5d^2/2+d}\), where \(c\) is the consant above. By contrast to other quantitative \((p,q)\) theorems, the result is notable in that \(3d+1\) is linear in \(d\).











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