Isotropy and Log-Concave Polynomials: Accelerated Sampling and High-Precision Counting of Matroid Bases

We define a notion of isotropy for discrete set distributions. If μ is a distribution over subsets S of a ground set [ n], we say that μ is in isotropic position if μ[e ∈ S] is the same for all e ∈ [n]. We design a new approximate sampling algorithm that leverages isotropy for the class of distributions μ that have a log-concave generating polynomial; this class includes determinantal point processes, strongly Rayleigh distributions, and uniform distributions over matroid bases. We show that when μ is in approximately isotropic position, the running time of our algorithm depends polynomially on the size of the set S, and only logarithmically on n. When n is much larger than the size of S, this is significantly faster than prior algorithms, and can even be sublinear in n. We then show how to transform a non-isotropic μ into an equivalent approximately isotropic form with a polynomial-time pre-processing step, accelerating subsequent sampling times. The main new ingredient enabling our algorithms is a class of negative dependence inequalities that may be of independent interest. As an application of our results, we show how to approximately count bases of a matroid of rank k over a ground set of n elements to within a factor of 1+ε in time O((n+1/ε2) ·poly(k,logn)). This is the first algorithm that runs in nearly linear time for fixed rank k, and achieves an inverse polynomially low approximation error. The full version of this paper is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09079.