Comparison of Tree-Child Phylogenetic Networks

Abstract—Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allow for the representation of non-treelike evolutionary events, like recombination, hybridization, or lateral gene transfer. While much progress has been made to find practical algorithms for reconstructing a phylogenetic network from a set of sequences, all attempts to endorse a class of phylogenetic networks (strictly extending the class of phylogenetic trees) with a well-founded distance measure have, to the best of our knowledge and with the only exception of the bipartition distance on regular networks, failed so far. In this paper, we present and study a new meaningful class of phylogenetic networks, called tree-child phylogenetic networks, and we provide an injective representation of these networks as multisets of vectors of natural numbers, their path multiplicity vectors. We then use this representation to define a distance on this class that extends the well-known RobinsonFoulds distance for...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Gabriel Cardona, Francesc Rosselló, Gabriel Valiente
• Keywords: CORR 2007, Education, Phylogenetic Networks, Phylogenetic Trees, Tree-child Phylogenetic Networks