Reconstructing fully-resolved trees from triplet cover distances

Huber, Katharina T. and Steel, Mike (2014) Reconstructing fully-resolved trees from triplet cover distances. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 21 (2). ISSN 1077-8926

[thumbnail of huber_steel_may_17-2013]
Preview
PDF (huber_steel_may_17-2013) - Accepted Version
Download (176kB) | Preview

Abstract

It is a classical result that any finite tree with positively weighted edges, and without vertices of degree 2, is uniquely determined by the weighted path distance between each pair of leaves. Moreover, it is possible for a (small) strict subset L of leaf pairs to suffice for reconstructing the tree and its edge weights, given just the distances between the leaf pairs in L. It is known that any set L with this property for a tree in which all interior vertices have degree 3 must form a cover for T {that is, for each interior vertex v of T, L must contain a pair of leaves from each pair of the three components of T ̶ v. Here we provide a partial converse of this result by showing that if a set L of leaf pairs forms a cover of a certain type for such a tree T then T and its edge weights can be uniquely determined from the distances between the pairs of leaves in L. Moreover, there is a polynomial-time algorithm for achieving this reconstruction. The result establishes a special case of a recent question concerning `triplet covers', and is relevant to a problem arising in evolutionary genomics.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: x-tree,tree metric,tree reconstruction,shellability,triplet cover
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology > Phylogenetics (former - to 2018)
Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Computational Biology
Related URLs:
Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2014 13:58
Last Modified: 13 Jun 2023 08:17
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48511
DOI:

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item