Sublinear Bounds for a Quantitative Doignon-Bell-Scarf Theorem

Abstract

The recent paper "A quantitative Doignon-Bell-Scarf Theorem" by Aliev et al. generalizes the famous Doignon-Bell-Scarf Theorem on the existence of integer solutions to systems of linear inequalities. Their generalization examines the number of facets of a polyhedron that contains exactly $k$ integer points in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$. They show that there exists a number $c(n,k)$ such that any polyhedron in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ that contains exactly $k$ integer points has a relaxation to at most $c(n,k)$ of its inequalities that will define a new polyhedron with the same integer points. They prove that $c(n,k)=O(k{2}^n)$. In this paper, we improve the bound asymptotically to be sublinear in $k$. We also provide lower bounds on $c(n,k)$, along with other structural results. For dimension $n=2$, our bounds are asymptotically tight to within a constant.