Satisfying ternary permutation constraints by multiple linear orders or phylogenetic trees

TL;DR

This paper classifies the complexity of satisfying ternary permutation constraints with multiple linear orders or phylogenetic trees, revealing abrupt complexity changes and establishing hardness in biologically relevant cases.

Contribution

It provides a complete complexity classification for the 2-Pi problems and analyzes the computational hardness of related phylogenetic tree compatibility problems.

Findings

Complexity landscape changes sharply from one to two linear orders.

Certain problems remain hard even with three linear orders or phylogenetic trees.

Extremal bounds on the minimum number of trees needed for triplet constraints.

Abstract

A ternary permutation constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is specified by a subset Pi of the symmetric group S_3. An instance of such a problem consists of a set of variables V and a set of constraints C, where each constraint is an ordered triple of distinct elements from V. The goal is to construct a linear order alpha on V such that, for each constraint (a,b,c) in C, the ordering of a,b,c induced by alpha is in Pi. Excluding symmetries and trivial cases there are 11 such problems, and their complexity is well known. Here we consider the variant of the problem, denoted 2-Pi, where we are allowed to construct two linear orders alpha and beta and each constraint needs to be satisfied by at least one of the two. We give a full complexity classification of all 11 2-Pi problems, observing that in the switch from one to two linear orders the complexity landscape changes quite abruptly and that hardness proofs become rather intricate. We then focus on one of the 11 problems in particular, which is closely related to the '2-Caterpillar Compatibility' problem in the phylogenetics literature. We show that this particular CSP remains hard on three linear orders, and also in the biologically relevant case when we swap three linear orders for three phylogenetic trees, yielding the '3-Tree Compatibility' problem. Due to the biological relevance of this problem we also give extremal results concerning the minimum number of trees required, in the worst case, to satisfy a set of rooted triplet constraints on n leaf labels.