Border correlations, lattices, and the subgraph component polynomial

We consider the border sets of partial words and study the combinatorics of specific representations of them, called border correlations, which are binary vectors of same length indicating the borders. We characterize precisely which of these vectors are valid border correlations, and establish a one-to-one correspondence between the set of valid border correlations and the set of valid ternary period correlations of a given length, the latter being ternary vectors representing the strong and strictly weak period sets. It turns out that the sets of all border correlations of a given length form distributive lattices under suitably defined partial orderings. We also give connections between the ternary period correlation of a partial word and its refined border correlation which specifies the lengths of all the word's bordered cyclic shifts' minimal borders. Finally, we investigate the population size, that is, the number of partial words sharing a given (refined) border correlation, and obtain formulas to compute it. We do so using the subgraph component polynomial of an undirected graph, introduced recently by Tittmann et al. (2011), which counts the number of connected components in vertex induced subgraphs.