Expansion of random 0/1 polytopes

Abstract

A conjecture of Milena Mihail and Umesh Vazirani (Proc. 24th Annu. ACM Symp. Theory Comput., ACM, Victoria, BC, 1992, pp. 26–38.) states that the edge expansion of the graph of every polytope is at least one. Any lower bound on the edge expansion gives an upper bound for the mixing time of a random walk on the graph of the polytope. Such random walks are important because they can be used to generate an element from a set of combinatorial objects uniformly at random. A weaker form of the conjecture of Mihail and Vazirani says that the edge expansion of the graph of a polytope in is greater than one over some polynomial function of . This weaker version of the conjecture would suffice for all applications. Our main result is that the edge expansion of the graph of a random polytope in is at least with high probability.