The Maximum Number of Bases in a Family of Vectors

Abstract

The proportion of $d$-element subsets of $\mathbb{F}_2^d$ that are bases is asymptotic to $\prod_{j=1}^{\infty}(1-2^{-j}) \approx 0.29$ as $d \to \infty$. It is natural to ask whether there exists a (large) subset $\mathcal{F}$ of $\mathbb{F}_2^d$ such that the proportion of $d$-element subsets of $\mathcal{F}$ that are bases is (asymptotically) greater than this number. As well as being a natural question in its own right, this would imply better lower bounds on the Tur\'an densities of certain hypercubes and `daisy' hypergraphs. We give a negative answer to the above question. More generally, we obtain an asymptotically sharp upper bound on the proportion of linearly independent $r$-element subsets of a (large) family of vectors in $\mathbb{F}_2^d$, for $r \leq d$. This bound follows from an exact result concerning the probability of obtaining a linearly independent sequence when we randomly sample $r$ elements with replacement from our family of vectors: we show that this probability, for any family of vectors, is at most what it is when the family is the whole space $\mathbb{F}_2^d \setminus \{0\}$. Our results also go through when $\mathbb{F}_2$ is replaced by $\mathbb{F}_q$ for any prime power $q$.