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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2017.37

On the Complexity of Partial Derivatives

Authors: Ignacio Garcia-Marco, Pascal Koiran, Timothée Pecatte, and Stéphan Thomassé

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 66, 34th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2017)

Abstract

The method of partial derivatives is one of the most successful lower bound methods for arithmetic circuits. It uses as a complexity measure the dimension of the span of the partial derivatives of a polynomial. In this paper, we consider this complexity measure as a computational problem: for an input polynomial given as the sum of its nonzero monomials, what is the complexity of computing the dimension of its space of partial derivatives? We show that this problem is #P-hard and we ask whether it belongs to #P. We analyze the "trace method", recently used in combinatorics and in algebraic complexity to lower bound the rank of certain matrices. We show that this method provides a polynomial-time computable lower bound on the dimension of the span of partial derivatives, and from this method we derive closed-form lower bounds. We leave as an open problem the existence of an approximation algorithm with reasonable performance guarantees.

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Ignacio Garcia-Marco, Pascal Koiran, Timothée Pecatte, and Stéphan Thomassé. On the Complexity of Partial Derivatives. In 34th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 66, pp. 37:1-37:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017)

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@InProceedings{garciamarco_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2017.37,
  author =	{Garcia-Marco, Ignacio and Koiran, Pascal and Pecatte, Timoth\'{e}e and Thomass\'{e}, St\'{e}phan},
  title =	{{On the Complexity of Partial Derivatives}},
  booktitle =	{34th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2017)},
  pages =	{37:1--37:13},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-028-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2017},
  volume =	{66},
  editor =	{Vollmer, Heribert and Vall\'{e}e, Brigitte},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2017.37},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-69964},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2017.37},
  annote =	{Keywords: counting complexity, simplicial complex, lower bounds, arithmetic circuits}
}

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On the Complexity of Partial Derivatives

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