Mining Posets from Linear Orders

Procesco L. Fernandez, Lenwood Heath, Naren Ramakrishnan, Michael Tan, John Paul Vergara

Abstract

There has been much research on the combinatorial problem of generating the linear extensions of a given poset. This paper focuses on the reverse of that problem, where the input is a set of linear orders, and the goal is to construct a poset or set of posets that generates the input. Such a problem finds applications in computational neuroscience, systems biology, paleontology, and physical plant engineering. In this paper, two algorithms are presented for efficiently finding a single poset, if, such a poset exists whose linear extensions are exactly the same as the input set of linear orders. The variation of the problem where a minimum set of posets that cover the input is also explored. This variation is shown to be polynomially solvable for one class of simple posets (kite(2) posets) but NP-complete for a related class (hammock(2,2,2) posets).