Higher Connectivity of Fiber Graphs of Gröbner Bases

Abstract

Fiber graphs of Gröbner bases from contingency tables are important in statistical hypothesis testing, where one studies random walks on these graphs using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The connectivity of the graphs has implications on how fast the algorithm converges. In this paper, we study a class of ber graphs with elementary combinatorial techniques and provide results that support a recent conjecture of Engström: the connectivity is given by the minimum vertex degree.