Constructing Majority-Rule Supertrees

Background: Supertree methods combine the phylogenetic information from multiple partially-overlapping trees into a larger phylogenetic tree called a supertree. Several supertree construction methods have been proposed to date, but most of these are not designed with any specific properties in mind. Recently, Cotton and Wilkinson proposed extensions of the majority-rule consensus tree method to the supertree setting that inherit many of the appealing properties of the former. Results: We study a variant of one of Cotton and Wilkinson’s methods, called majority-rule (+) supertrees. After proving that a key underlying problem for constructing majority-rule (+) supertrees is NP-hard, we develop a polynomial-size exact integer linear programming formulation of the problem. We then present a data reduction heuristic that identifies smaller subproblems that can be solved independently. While this technique is not guaranteed to produce optimal solutions, it can achieve substantial problem-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WABI
• Authors: Jianrong Dong, David Fernández-Baca, Fred R. McMorris
• Keywords: Algorithms, Data Reduction, Supertree Construction Methods, Supertree Methods, WABI 2009