Untangling Tanglegrams: Comparing Trees by Their Drawings

A tanglegram is a pair of trees on the same set of leaves with matching leaves in the two trees joined by an edge. Tanglegrams are widely used in biology – to compare evolutionary histories of host and parasite species and to analyze genes of species in the same geographical area. We consider optimizations problems in tanglegram drawings. We show a linear time algorithm to decide if a tanglegram admits a planar embedding by a reduction to the planar graph drawing problem. This problem was also studied by Fernau, Kauffman and Poths (FSTTCS 2005). A similar reduction to a graph crossing problem also helps to solve an open problem they posed, showing a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for minimizing the number of crossings over all d-ary trees. For the case where one tree is fixed, we show an O(n log n) algorithm to determine the drawing of the second tree that minimizes the number of crossings. This improves the bound from earlier methods. We introduce a new optimization criterio...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ISBRA
• Authors: Balaji Venkatachalam, Jim Apple, Katherine St. John, Dan Gusfield
• Keywords: Bioinformatics, Graph Crossing Problem, Graph Drawing Problem, ISBRA 2009, Tanglegram Drawings