English

Complexity and algorithms for finding a perfect phylogeny from mixed tumor samples

Populations and Evolution 2016-07-11 v4 Computational Complexity Discrete Mathematics Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

Recently, Hajirasouliha and Raphael (WABI 2014) proposed a model for deconvoluting mixed tumor samples measured from a collection of high-throughput sequencing reads. This is related to understanding tumor evolution and critical cancer mutations. In short, their formulation asks to split each row of a binary matrix so that the resulting matrix corresponds to a perfect phylogeny and has the minimum number of rows among all matrices with this property. In this paper we disprove several claims about this problem, including an NP-hardness proof of it. However, we show that the problem is indeed NP-hard, by providing a different proof. We also prove NP-completeness of a variant of this problem proposed in the same paper. On the positive side, we propose an efficient (though not necessarily optimal) heuristic algorithm based on coloring co-comparability graphs, and a polynomial time algorithm for solving the problem optimally on matrix instances in which no column is contained in both columns of a pair of conflicting columns. Implementations of these algorithms are freely available at https://github.com/alexandrutomescu/MixedPerfectPhylogeny

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.07675,
  title  = {Complexity and algorithms for finding a perfect phylogeny from mixed tumor samples},
  author = {Ademir Hujdurović and Urša Kačar and Martin Milanič and Bernard Ries and Alexandru I. Tomescu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.07675},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

This is the extended version of Hujdurovi\'c et al, Finding a perfect phylogeny from mixed tumor samples, WABI 2015, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-48221-6_6

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:00:01.641Z