Matroid stratifications of hypergraph varieties, their realization spaces, and discrete conditional independence models

We study varieties associated to hypergraphs from the point of view of projective geometry and matroid theory. We describe their decompositions into matroid varieties, which may be reducible and can have arbitrary singularities by the Mn\"ev--Sturmfels universality theorem. We focus on various families of hypergraph varieties for which we explicitly compute an irredundant irreducible decomposition. Our main findings in this direction are threefold: (1) we describe minimal matroids of such hypergraphs; (2) we prove that the varieties of these matroids are irreducible and their union is the hypergraph variety; and (3) we show that every such matroid is realizable over real numbers. As corollaries, we give conceptual decompositions of various, previously-studied, varieties associated with graphs, hypergraphs, and adjacent minors of generic matrices. In particular, our decomposition strategy gives immediate matroid interpretations of the irreducible components of multiple families of varieties associated to conditional independence (CI) models in statistical theory and unravels their symmetric structures which hugely simplifies the computations.
Comment: Final version to appear in International Mathematics Research Notices (IMRN)