New Conjectures for Union-Closed Families

Jonad Pulaj, Annie Raymond, Dirk Theis

Published 2015-11-30Version 1

The Frankl conjecture, also known as the union-closed sets conjecture, states that there exists an element in at least half of the sets of any (non-empty) union-closed family. From an optimization point of view, one could instead prove that $2a$ is an upperbound to the number of sets in a union-closed family with $n$ elements where each element is in at most $a$ sets for all $a,n\in \mathbb{N}^+$. Similarly, one could prove that the minimum number of sets containing the most frequent element in a (non-empty) union-closed family with $m$ sets and $n$ elements is at least $\frac{m}{2}$ for any $m,n\in \mathbb{N}^+$. Formulating these problems as integer programs we observe that computed optimal values do not vary with $n$. We formalize these observations as conjectures, and show that they are not equivalent to the Frankl conjecture while still having wide-reaching implications if proven true. Finally, we partially prove the new conjectures and discuss possible approaches to solve them completely.