Activity from matroids to rooted trees and beyond

Abstract: The interior and exterior activities of bases of a matroid are well-known notions that for instance permit one to define the Tutte polynomial. Recently, we have discovered correspondences between the regions of gainic hyperplane arrangements and coloredlabeled rooted trees. Here we define a general activity theory that applies in particular to no-broken circuit (NBC) sets and labeled colored trees. The special case of activity \textsf{0} was our motivating case. As a consequence, in a gainic hyperplane arrangement the number of bounded regions is equal to the number of the corresponding colored labeled rooted trees of activity \textsf{0}.