Matroidal Cycles and Hypergraph Families

Abstract

We propose a novel definition of hypergraphical matroids, defined for arbitrary hypergraphs, simultaneously generalizing previous definitions for regular hypergraphs (Main, 1978), and for the hypergraphs of circuits of a matroid (Freij-Hollanti, Jurrius, Kuznetsova, 2023). As a consequence, we obtain a new notion of cycles in hypergraphs, and hypertrees. We give an equivalence relation on hypergraphs, according to when their so-called matroidal closures agree. Finally, we characterize hypergraphs that are isomorphic to the circuit hypergraphs of the associated matroids.