On unirational varieties with poset parameterizations

We use partially ordered sets (posets) to provide a canonical parameterization for the Zariski closure of the image of a semialgebraic set under a rational map whose coordinate functions are polynomials with nonnegative integral coefficients. The resulting poset parametrization of such a unirational variety allows us to translate several well-studied problems into combinatorics; e.g. reducing the problems to describing the poset associated to the variety. These problems include, the implicitization problem from algebraic geometry, the toric reparameterization problem, the computation of the linear span of the variety, and the problem of distinguishing two semialgebraic subsets of the same ambient space. The technique applies to instances of these problems in several fields, including algebraic geometry, algebraic combinatorics, statistics and applied algebra. We demonstrate the technique on examples from each field, including degenerate subvarieties of secant varieties, matroid flat varieties -- which generalize toric varieties of edge polytopes, as well as varieties arising in multivariate data analysis and evolutionary biology.