In this note, we study the mean length of the longest increasing subsequence of a uniformly sampled involution that avoids the pattern $3412$ and another pattern.
A emph{set partition} of the set $[n]={1,...c,n}$ is a collection of disjoint blocks $B_1,B_2,...c, B_d$ whose union is $[n]$. We choose the ordering of the blocks so that they satisfy $min B_1<min B_2<...b<min B_d$. We represent such a set partition by a emph{canonical sequence} $pi_1,pi_2,...c,pi_n$, with $pi_i=j$ if $iin B_j$. We say that a partition $pi$ emph{contains} a partition $sigma$ if the canonical sequence of $pi$ contains a subsequence that is order-isomorphic to the canonical sequence of $sigma$. Two partitions $sigma$ and $sigma$ are emph{equivalent}, if there is a size-preserving bijection between $sigma$-avoiding and $sigma$-avoiding partitions. We determine several infinite families of sets of equivalent patterns; for instance, we prove that there is a bijection between $k$-noncrossing and $k$-nonnesting partitions, with a notion of crossing and nesting based on the canonical sequence. We also provide new combinatorial interpretations of the Catalan numbers and the Stirling numbers. Using a systematic computer search, we verify that our results characterize all the pairs of equivalent partitions of size at most seven. We also present a correspondence between set partitions and fillings of Ferrers shapes and stack polyominoes. This correspondence allows us to apply recent results on polyomino fillings in the study of partitions, and conversely, some of our results on partitions imply new results on polyomino fillings and ordered graphs.
Chen proposed a conjecture on the log-concavity of the generating function for the symmetric group with respect to the length of longest increasing subsequences of permutations. Motivated by Chens log-concavity conjecture, B{o}na, Lackner and Sagan further studied similar problems by restricting the whole symmetric group to certain of its subsets. They obtained the log-concavity of the corresponding generating functions for these subsets by using the hook-length formula. In this paper, we generalize and prove their results by establishing the Schur positivity of certain symmetric functions. This also enables us to propose a new approach to Chens original conjecture.
An alternating permutation of length $n$ is a permutation $pi=pi_1 pi_2 ... pi_n$ such that $pi_1 < pi_2 > pi_3 < pi_4 > ...$. Let $A_n$ denote set of alternating permutations of ${1,2,..., n}$, and let $A_n(sigma)$ be set of alternating permutations in $A_n$ that avoid a pattern $sigma$. Recently, Lewis used generating trees to enumerate $A_{2n}(1234)$, $A_{2n}(2143)$ and $A_{2n+1}(2143)$, and he posed several conjectures on the Wilf-equivalence of alternating permutations avoiding certain patterns. Some of these conjectures have been proved by Bona, Xu and Yan. In this paper, we prove the two relations $|A_{2n+1}(1243)|=|A_{2n+1}(2143)|$ and $|A_{2n}(4312)|=|A_{2n}(1234)|$ as conjectured by Lewis.
In this work, we consider a variant of the classical Longest Common Subsequence problem called Doubly-Constrained Longest Common Subsequence (DC-LCS). Given two strings s1 and s2 over an alphabet A, a set C_s of strings, and a function Co from A to N, the DC-LCS problem consists in finding the longest subsequence s of s1 and s2 such that s is a supersequence of all the strings in Cs and such that the number of occurrences in s of each symbol a in A is upper bounded by Co(a). The DC-LCS problem provides a clear mathematical formulation of a sequence comparison problem in Computational Biology and generalizes two other constrained variants of the LCS problem: the Constrained LCS and the Repetition-Free LCS. We present two results for the DC-LCS problem. First, we illustrate a fixed-parameter algorithm where the parameter is the length of the solution. Secondly, we prove a parameterized hardness result for the Constrained LCS problem when the parameter is the number of the constraint strings and the size of the alphabet A. This hardness result also implies the parameterized hardness of the DC-LCS problem (with the same parameters) and its NP-hardness when the size of the alphabet is constant.
Longest Run Subsequence is a problem introduced recently in the context of the scaffolding phase of genome assembly (Schrinner et al., WABI 2020). The problem asks for a maximum length subsequence of a given string that contains at most one run for each symbol (a run is a maximum substring of consecutive identical symbols). The problem has been shown to be NP-hard and to be fixed-parameter tractable when the parameter is the size of the alphabet on which the input string is defined. In this paper we further investigate the complexity of the problem and we show that it is fixed-parameter tractable when it is parameterized by the number of runs in a solution, a smaller parameter. Moreover, we investigate the kernelization complexity of Longest Run Subsequence and we prove that it does not admit a polynomial kernel when parameterized by the size of the alphabet or by the number of runs. Finally, we consider the restriction of Longest Run Subsequence when each symbol has at most two occurrences in the input string and we show that it is APX-hard.