Induced matroids

Abstract

There are several known results concerning how matroids can be induced from given matroids by a bipartite graph and the properties that are inherited in this way. The purpose of this note is to extend some of these results to the situation where the bipartite graph is replaced by an arbitrary directed graph. We show how a directed graph and a matroid can be used to induce a new matroid. If the initial matroid is strongly base orderable, we prove that the induced matroid is also. In particular, a matroid induced from a free matroid by a directed graph is strongly base orderable. A consequence is that the cycle matroid of the complete graph on four nodes cannot be induced from a free matroid by any directed graph.