Multicolour containers and the entropy of decorated graph limits

Abstract: In recent breakthrough results, Saxton--Thomason and Balogh--Morris--Samotij have developed powerful theories of hypergraph containers. These theories have led to a large number of new results on transference, and on counting and characterising typical graphs in hereditary properties. In a different direction, Hatami--Janson--Szegedy proved results on the entropy of graph limits which count and characterise graphs in dense hereditary properties. In this paper, we make a threefold contribution to this area of research: 1) We generalise results of Saxton--Thomason to obtain container theorems for general, dense hereditary properties of multicoloured graphs. Our main tool is the adoption of an entropy-based framework. As corollaries, we obtain general counting, characterization and transference results. We further extend our results to cover a variety of combinatorial structures: directed graphs, oriented graphs, tournaments, multipartite graphs, multi-graphs, hypercubes and hypergraphs. 2) We generalise the results of Hatami--Janson--Szegedy on the entropy of graph limits to the setting of decorated graph limits. In particular we define a cut norm for decorated graph limits and prove compactness of the space of decorated graph limits under that norm. 3) We explore a weak equivalence between the container and graph limit approaches to counting and characterising graphs in hereditary properties. In one direction, we show how our multicolour container results may be used to recover decorated versions of the results of Hatami--Janson--Szegedy. In the other direction, we show that our decorated extensions of Hatami--Janson--Szegedy's results on graph limits imply counting and characterization applications. Similar container results were recently obtained independently by Terry.