Factoring Pattern-Free Permutations into Separable ones

Abstract

We show that for any permutation $π$ there exists an integer $k_π$ such that every permutation avoiding $π$ as a pattern is a product of at most $k_π$ separable permutations. In other words, every strict class $\mathcal C$ of permutations is contained in a bounded power of the class of separable permutations. This factorisation can be computed in linear time, for any fixed $π$. The central tool for our result is a notion of width of permutations, introduced by Guillemot and Marx [SODA '14] to efficiently detect patterns, and later generalised to graphs and matrices under the name of twin-width. Specifically, our factorisation is inspired by the decomposition used in the recent result that graphs with bounded twin-width are polynomially $χ$-bounded. As an application, we show that there is a fixed class $\mathcal C$ of graphs of bounded twin-width such that every class of bounded twin-width is a first-order transduction of $\mathcal C$.