Approximating the volume of a truncated relaxation of the independence polytope

Answering a question of Gamarnik and Smedira, we give a polynomial time algorithm that approximately computes the volume of a truncation of a relaxation of the independent set polytope, improving on their quasi-polynomial time algorithm. Our algorithm is obtained by viewing the volume as an evaluation of a graph polynomial and we approximate this evaluation using Barvinok’s interpolation method.