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Partition matroid

Direct sum of uniform matroids

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Source updated July 22, 2026

In mathematics, a partition matroid or partitional matroid is a matroid that is a direct sum of uniform matroids. It is defined over a base set in which the elements are partitioned into different categories. For each category, there is a capacity constraint - a maximum number of allowed elements from this category. The independent sets of a partition matroid are exactly the sets in which, for each category, the number of elements from this category is at most the category capacity.

01Formal definition

Let $C_{i}$ be a collection of disjoint sets ("categories"). Let $d_{i}$ be integers with $0\leq d_{i}\leq |C_{i}|$ ("capacities"). Define a subset $I\subseteq \bigcup _{i}C_{i}$ to be "independent" when, for every index $i$ , $|I\cap C_{i}|\leq d_{i}$ . The sets satisfying this condition form the independent sets of a matroid, called a partition matroid.

The sets $C_{i}$ are called the categories or the blocks of the partition matroid.

A basis of the partition matroid is a set whose intersection with every block $C_{i}$ has size exactly $d_{i}$ . A circuit of the matroid is a subset of a single block $C_{i}$ with size exactly $d_{i}+1$ . The rank of the matroid is $\sum d_{i}$ .

Every uniform matroid $U{}_{n}^{r}$ is a partition matroid, with a single block $C_{1}$ of $n$ elements and with $d_{1}=r$ . Every partition matroid is the direct sum of a collection of uniform matroids, one for each of its blocks.

In some publications, the notion of a partition matroid is defined more restrictively, with every $d_{i}=1$ . The partitions that obey this more restrictive definition are the transversal matroids of the family of disjoint sets given by their blocks.

02Properties

As with the uniform matroids they are formed from, the dual matroid of a partition matroid is also a partition matroid, and every minor of a partition matroid is also a partition matroid. Direct sums of partition matroids are partition matroids as well.

03Matching

A maximum matching in a graph is a set of edges that is as large as possible subject to the condition that no two edges share an endpoint. In a bipartite graph with bipartition $(U,V)$ , the sets of edges satisfying the condition that no two edges share an endpoint in $U$ are the independent sets of a partition matroid with one block per vertex in $U$ and with each of the numbers $d_{i}$ equal to one. The sets of edges satisfying the condition that no two edges share an endpoint in $V$ are the independent sets of a second partition matroid. Therefore, the bipartite maximum matching problem can be represented as a matroid intersection of these two matroids.

More generally the matchings of a graph may be represented as an intersection of two matroids if and only if every odd cycle in the graph is a triangle containing two or more degree-two vertices.

04Clique complexes

A clique complex is a family of sets of vertices of a graph $G$ that induce complete subgraphs of $G$ . A clique complex forms a matroid if and only if $G$ is a complete multipartite graph, and in this case the resulting matroid is a partition matroid. The clique complexes are exactly the set systems that can be formed as intersections of families of partition matroids for which every $d_{i}=1$ .

05Enumeration

The number of distinct partition matroids that can be defined over a set of $n$ labeled elements, for $n=0,1,2,\dots$ , is

1, 2, 5, 16, 62, 276, 1377, 7596, 45789, 298626, 2090910, ... (sequence A005387 in the OEIS).

The exponential generating function of this sequence is $f(x)=\exp(e^{x}(x-1)+2x+1)$ .

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Partition matroid”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

Partition matroid.svg by BagLuke, CC0

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