On the attractor of piecewise expanding maps of the interval

We consider piecewise expanding maps of the interval with finitely many branches of monotonicity and show that they are generically combinatorially stable, i.e., the number of ergodic attractors and their corresponding mixing periods do not change under small perturbations of the map. Our methods provide a topological description of the attractor and, in particular, give an elementary proof of the density of periodic orbits.