Eulerian polynomials, Stirling permutations and increasing trees

Abstract

We study two generalizations of the gamma-expansion of Eulerian polynomials from the viewpoint of the decompositions of statistics. We first present an expansion formula of the trivariate Eulerian polynomials, which are the enumerators for the joint distribution of descents, big ascents and successions of permutations. And then, inspired by the work of Chen and Fu on the trivariate second-order Eulerian polynomials, we show the e-positivity of the multivariate k-th order Eulerian polynomials, which are the enumerators for the joint distribution of ascents, descents and j-plateaux of k-Stirling permutations. We provide combinatorial interpretations for the coefficients of these two expansions in terms of increasing trees.