Pattern matching for permutations

Abstract

Given a permutation T of 1 to n, and a permutation P of 1 to k, for k ≤ n, we wish to find a k-element subsequence of T whose elements are ordered according to the permutation P. For example, if P is (1,2,..., k), then we wish to find an increasing subsequence of length k in T; this special case was done in time O(n log log n) by Chang and Wang. We prove that the general problem is NP-complete. We give a polynomial time algorithm for the decision problem, and the corresponding counting problem, in the case that P is separable - i.e., contains neither the subpattern (3,1,4,2) nor its reverse, the subpattern (2,4,1,3)