Ideals of Graph Homomorphisms

Abstract. In combinatorial commutative algebra and algebraic statistics many toric ideals are constructed from graphs. Keeping the categorical structure of graphs in mind we give previous results a more functorial context and generalize them by introducing the ideals of graph homo-morphisms. For this new class of ideals we investigate how the topology of the graphs influence the algebraic properties. We describe explicit Gröbner bases for several classes, generalizing results by Hibi, Sturmfels and Sullivant. One of our main tools is the toric fiber product, and we employ results by Engström, Kahle and Sullivant. The lattice polytopes defined by our ideals include important classes in optimization theory, as the stable set polytopes