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A long line of research on fixed parameter tractability of integer programming culminated with showing that integer programs with n variables and a constraint matrix with tree-depth d and largest entry Δ are solvable in time g(d,Δ) poly(n) for some function g, i.e., fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by tree-depth d and Δ. However, the tree-depth of a constraint matrix depends on the positions of its non-zero entries and thus does not reflect its geometric structure. In particular, tree-depth of a constraint matrix is not preserved by row operations, i.e., a given integer program can be equivalent to another with a smaller dual tree-depth. We prove that the branch-depth of the matroid defined by the columns of the constraint matrix is equal to the minimum tree-depth of a row-equivalent matrix. We also design a fixed parameter algorithm parameterized by an integer d and the entry complexity of an input matrix that either outputs a matrix with the smallest dual tree-depth that is row-equivalent to the input matrix or outputs that there is no matrix with dual tree-depth at most d that is row-equivalent to the input matrix. Finally, we use these results to obtain a fixed parameter algorithm for integer programming parameterized by the branch-depth of the input constraint matrix and the entry complexity. The parameterization by branch-depth cannot be replaced by the more permissive notion of branch-width.
@InProceedings{chan_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.26,
author = {Chan, Timothy F. N. and Cooper, Jacob W. and Kouteck\'{y}, Martin and Kr\'{a}l', Daniel and Pek\'{a}rkov\'{a}, Krist\'{y}na},
title = {{Matrices of Optimal Tree-Depth and Row-Invariant Parameterized Algorithm for Integer Programming}},
booktitle = {47th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2020)},
pages = {26:1--26:19},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-138-2},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {168},
editor = {Czumaj, Artur and Dawar, Anuj and Merelli, Emanuela},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.26},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-124339},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.26},
annote = {Keywords: Matroid algorithms, width parameters, integer programming, fixed parameter tractability, branch-width, branch-depth}
}