Operators of equivalent sorting power and related Wilf-equivalences

We study sorting operators $\mathbf{A}$ on permutations that are obtained composing Knuth's stack sorting operator $\mathbf{S}$ and the reversal operator $\mathbf{R}$, as many times as desired. For any such operator $\mathbf{A}$, we provide a size-preserving bijection between the set of permutations sorted by $\mathbf{S} \circ \mathbf{A}$ and the set of those sorted by $\mathbf{S} \circ \mathbf{R} \circ \mathbf{A}$, proving that these sets are enumerated by the same sequence, but also that many classical permutation statistics are equidistributed across these two sets. The description of this family of bijections is based on a bijection between the set of permutations avoiding the pattern $231$ and the set of those avoiding $132$ which preserves many permutation statistics. We also present other properties of this bijection, in particular for finding pairs of Wilf-equivalent permutation classes.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

Longest Common Separable Pattern between Permutations

In this article, we study the problem of finding the longest common separable pattern between several permutations. We give a polynomial-time algorithm when the number of input permutations is fixed and show that the problem is NP-hard for an arbitrary number of input permutations even if these permutations are separable. On the other hand, we show that the NP-hard problem of finding the longest common pattern between two permutations cannot be approximated better than within a ratio of $sqrt{Opt}$ (where $Opt$ is the size of an optimal solution) when taking common patterns belonging to pattern-avoiding classes of permutations.Comment: 15 page

Deciding the finiteness of the number of simple permutations contained in a wreath-closed class is polynomial

We present an algorithm running in time O(n ln n) which decides if a wreath-closed permutation class Av(B) given by its finite basis B contains a finite number of simple permutations. The method we use is based on an article of Brignall, Ruskuc and Vatter which presents a decision procedure (of high complexity) for solving this question, without the assumption that Av(B) is wreath-closed. Using combinatorial, algorithmic and language theoretic arguments together with one of our previous results on pin-permutations, we are able to transform the problem into a co-finiteness problem in a complete deterministic automaton

A decorated tree approach to random permutations in substitution-closed classes

We establish a novel bijective encoding that represents permutations as forests of decorated (or enriched) trees. This allows us to prove local convergence of uniform random permutations from substitution-closed classes satisfying a criticality constraint. It also enables us to reprove and strengthen permuton limits for these classes in a new way, that uses a semi-local version of Aldous' skeleton decomposition for size-constrained Galton--Watson trees.Comment: New version including referee's corrections, accepted for publication in Electronic Journal of Probabilit

Enumerating five families of pattern-avoiding inversion sequences; and introducing the powered Catalan numbers

The first problem addressed by this article is the enumeration of some families of pattern-avoiding inversion sequences. We solve some enumerative conjectures left open by the foundational work on the topics by Corteel et al., some of these being also solved independently by Lin, and Kim and Lin. The strength of our approach is its robustness: we enumerate four families $F_1 \subset F_2 \subset F_3 \subset F_4$ of pattern-avoiding inversion sequences ordered by inclusion using the same approach. More precisely, we provide a generating tree (with associated succession rule) for each family $F_i$ which generalizes the one for the family $F_{i-1}$. The second topic of the paper is the enumeration of a fifth family $F_5$ of pattern-avoiding inversion sequences (containing $F_4$). This enumeration is also solved \emph{via} a succession rule, which however does not generalize the one for $F_4$. The associated enumeration sequence, which we call the \emph{powered Catalan numbers}, is quite intriguing, and further investigated. We provide two different succession rules for it, denoted $\Omega_{pCat}$ and $\Omega_{steady}$, and show that they define two types of families enumerated by powered Catalan numbers. Among such families, we introduce the \emph{steady paths}, which are naturally associated with $\Omega_{steady}$. They allow us to bridge the gap between the two types of families enumerated by powered Catalan numbers: indeed, we provide a size-preserving bijection between steady paths and valley-marked Dyck paths (which are naturally associated with $\Omega_{pCat}$). Along the way, we provide several nice connections to families of permutations defined by the avoidance of vincular patterns, and some enumerative conjectures.Comment: V2 includes modifications suggested by referees (in particular, a much shorter Section 3, to account for arXiv:1706.07213

Average-case analysis of perfect sorting by reversals (Journal Version)

Perfect sorting by reversals, a problem originating in computational genomics, is the process of sorting a signed permutation to either the identity or to the reversed identity permutation, by a sequence of reversals that do not break any common interval. B\'erard et al. (2007) make use of strong interval trees to describe an algorithm for sorting signed permutations by reversals. Combinatorial properties of this family of trees are essential to the algorithm analysis. Here, we use the expected value of certain tree parameters to prove that the average run-time of the algorithm is at worst, polynomial, and additionally, for sufficiently long permutations, the sorting algorithm runs in polynomial time with probability one. Furthermore, our analysis of the subclass of commuting scenarios yields precise results on the average length of a reversal, and the average number of reversals.Comment: A preliminary version of this work appeared in the proceedings of Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM) 2009. See arXiv:0901.2847; Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications, vol. 3(3), 201

Analysis of Algorithms for Permutations Biased by Their Number of Records

The topic of the article is the parametric study of the complexity of algorithms on arrays of pairwise distinct integers. We introduce a model that takes into account the non-uniformness of data, which we call the Ewens-like distribution of parameter $\theta$ for records on permutations: the weight $\theta^r$ of a permutation depends on its number $r$ of records. We show that this model is meaningful for the notion of presortedness, while still being mathematically tractable. Our results describe the expected value of several classical permutation statistics in this model, and give the expected running time of three algorithms: the Insertion Sort, and two variants of the Min-Max search