From Permutations to Horizontal Visibility Patterns of Periodic Series

Abstract

Periodic series of period T can be mapped into the set of permutations of [T−1]={1,2,3,…,T−1}. These permutations of period T can be classified according to the relative ordering of their elements by the horizontal visibility map. We prove that the number of horizontal visibility classes for each period T coincides with the number of triangulations of the polygon of T+1 vertices that, as is well known, is the Catalan number CT−1. We also study the robustness against Gaussian noise of the permutation patterns for each period and show that there are periodic permutations that better resist the increase of the variance of the noise.