A binary matrix has the Consecutive Ones Property (C1P) if its columns can be
ordered in such a way that all 1's on each row are consecutive. A Minimal
Conflicting Set is a set of rows that does not have the C1P, but every proper
subset has the C1P. Such submatrices have been considered in comparative
genomics applications, but very little is known about their combinatorial
structure and efficient algorithms to compute them. We first describe an
algorithm that detects rows that belong to Minimal Conflicting Sets. This
algorithm has a polynomial time complexity when the number of 1's in each row
of the considered matrix is bounded by a constant. Next, we show that the
problem of computing all Minimal Conflicting Sets can be reduced to the joint
generation of all minimal true clauses and maximal false clauses for some
monotone boolean function. We use these methods on simulated data related to
ancestral genome reconstruction to show that computing Minimal Conflicting Set
is useful in discriminating between true positive and false positive ancestral
syntenies. We also study a dataset of yeast genomes and address the reliability
of an ancestral genome proposal of the Saccahromycetaceae yeasts.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure