Abstract
LP-type problems is a successful axiomatic framework for optimization problems capturing, e.g., linear programming and the smallest enclosing ball of a point set. In Matoušek and Škovroň (Theory Comput. 3:159–177, 2007), it is proved that in order to remove degeneracies of an LP-type problem, we sometimes have to increase its combinatorial dimension by a multiplicative factor of at least 1+ε with a certain small positive constant ε. The proof goes by checking the unsolvability of a system of linear inequalities, with several pages of calculations.
Here by a short topological argument we prove that the dimension sometimes has to increase at least twice. We also construct 2-dimensional LP-type problems with −∞ for which removing degeneracies forces arbitrarily large dimension increase.
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Matoušek, J. Removing Degeneracy in LP-Type Problems Revisited. Discrete Comput Geom 42, 517–526 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-008-9085-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00454-008-9085-7