On non-monotonicity height of piecewise monotone functions

Abstract

Non-monotonicity height is an important index to describe the complexity of dynamics for piecewise monotone functions. Although it is used extensively in the theory of iterative roots, its calculation is still difficult especially in the infinite case. In this paper, by introducing the concept of spanning interval, we first present a sufficient condition for piecewise monotone functions to have height infinity and then an algorithm for finding the spanning intervals is given. We further investigate the density of all piecewise monotone functions with infinite and finite height, respectively, and the results indicate the instability of height. At the end of this paper, the variance of height under composition, especially for functions of height 1 and infinity, are also discussed.