Decomposition of triply rooted trees (Q1953487)

Summary: In this paper, we give a decomposition of triply rooted trees into three doubly rooted trees. This leads to a combinatorial interpretation of an identity conjectured by \textit{A. Lacasse} [Bornes PAC-Bayes et algorithmes d'apprentissage. Quebec: Universite Laval (Dissertation) (2010)] in the study of the PAC-Bayesian machine learning theory, and proved by \textit{M. Younsi} [``Proof of a combinatorial conjecture coming from the PAC-Bayesian machine learning theory'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1209.0824}] by using the Hurwitz identity on multivariate Abel polynomials. We also give a bijection between the set of functions from \([n+1]\) to \([n]\) and the set of triply rooted trees on \([n]\), which leads to the refined enumeration of functions from \([n+1]\) to \([n]\) with respect to the number of elements in the orbit of \(n+1\) and the number of periodic points.