Subgraph Polytopes and Independence Polytopes of Count Matroids

Abstract: Given an undirected graph, the non-empty subgraph polytope is the convex hull of the characteristic vectors of pairs (F, S) where S is a non-empty subset of nodes and F is a subset of the edges with both endnodes in S. We obtain a strong relationship between the non-empty subgraph polytope and the spanning forest polytope. We further show that these polytopes provide polynomial size extended formulations for independence polytopes of count matroids, which generalizes recent results obtained by Iwata et al. referring to sparsity matroids. As a byproduct, we obtain new lower bounds on the extension complexity of the spanning forest polytope in terms of extension complexities of independence polytopes of these matroids.