Negative correlation conjecture for uniformly random spanning forests

Let GG be a graph, and let F\mathbf{F} be a uniformly random forest chosen from all forests of GG. For edges e,fE(G)e,f\in E(G), negative correlation conjecture.

P(e,fF)P(eF)P(fF).\mathbb{P}(e,f\in \mathbf{F})\leq \mathbb{P}(e\in \mathbf{F})\mathbb{P}(f\in \mathbf{F}).

This conjecture asks whether edge inclusion events are negatively correlated for a uniformly random spanning forest. The source describes it as a well-known open problem and notes that it implies the regular-graph spanning-forest bound above.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Ferenc Bencs and Péter Csikvári, “Upper bound for the number of spanning forests of regular graphs”, arXiv:2105.06801 (2022).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2020–2021). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2005.12752.

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