Exact Matching and the Top-k Perfect Matching Problem

Understand

The aim of this note is to provide a reduction of the Exact Matching problem to the Top-$k$ Perfect Matching Problem.

• Together with earlier work by El Maalouly, this shows that the two problems are polynomial-time equivalent.
• The Exact Matching Problem is a well-known 40 years old problem for which a randomized, but no deterministic poly-time algorithm has been discovered.
• The Top-$k$ Perfect Matching Problem is the problem of finding a perfect matching which maximizes the total weight of the $k$ heaviest edges contained in it.