Some Results about the Contractions and the Pendant Pairs of a Submodular System

Abstract

Submodularity is an important property of set functions with deep theoretical results and various applications. Submodular systems appear in many applicable area, for example machine learning, economics, computer vision, social science, game theory and combinatorial optimization. Nowadays submodular functions optimization has been attracted by many researchers. Pendant pairs of a symmetric submodular system play essential role in finding a minimizer of this system. In this paper, we investigate some relations between pendant pairs of a submodular system and pendant pairs of its contractions. For a symmetric submodular system $left(V,fright)$ we construct a suitable sequence of $left|Vright|-1$ pendant pairs of its contractions. By using this sequence, we present some properties of the system and its contractions. Finally, we prove some results about the minimizers of a posimodular function.

Keywords

• Submodular system
• Submodular optimization
• Maximum adjacency ordering
• Posimodular functions
• Pendant pairs
• st-cut