English

On f-Derangements and Decomposing Bipartite Graphs into Paths

Combinatorics 2022-01-10 v1

Abstract

Let f:{1,...,n}{1,...,n}f: \{1, ..., n\} \rightarrow \{1, ..., n\} be a function (not necessarily one-to-one). An fderangementf-derangement is a permutation g:{1,...,n}{1,...,n} g:\{1,...,n\} \rightarrow \{1,...,n\} such that g(i)f(i)g(i) \neq f(i) for each i=1,...,n i = 1, ..., n. When ff is itself a permutation, this is a standard derangement. We examine properties of f-derangements, and show that when we fix the maximum number of preimages for any item under ff, the fraction of permutations that are f-derangements tends to 1/e 1/e for large nn, regardless of the choice of ff. We then use this result to analyze a heuristic method to decompose bipartite graphs into paths of length 5

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.02332,
  title  = {On f-Derangements and Decomposing Bipartite Graphs into Paths},
  author = {Michael Plantholt and Hamidreza Habibi and Benjamin Mussell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.02332},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:42:32.601Z