On vertices and facets of combinatorial 2-level polytopes (original) (raw)

2-level polytopes naturally appear in several areas of pure and applied mathematics, including combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, communication complexity, and statistics. In this paper, we present a study of some 2-level polytopes arising in combinatorial settings. Our first contribution is proving that f0(P)f d−1 (P) ≤ d2 d+1 for a large collection of families of such polytopes P. Here f0(P) (resp. f d−1 (P)) is the number of vertices (resp. facets) of P , and d is its dimension. Whether this holds for all 2-level polytopes was asked in [7], and experimental results from [16] showed it true for d ≤ 7. The key to most of our proofs is a deeper understanding of the relations among those polytopes and their underlying combinatorial structures. This leads to a number of results that we believe to be of independent interest: a trade-off formula for the number of cliques and stable sets in a graph; a description of stable matching polytopes as affine projections of certain order polytopes; and a linear-size description of the base polytope of matroids that are 2-level in terms of cuts of an associated tree.