English

Identifiability of phylogenetic networks and quintet concordance factors

Populations and Evolution 2026-08-04 v1 Algebraic Geometry

Abstract

Several statistical methods of phylogenetic network inference and testing for non-tree-like relationships are based on assessing genomic data through quartet Concordance Factors, the frequencies of 4-taxon topological relationships on gene trees. While such an approach obviates making several undesirable modeling assumptions, it also results in non-identifiability issues for network roots and for small cycles. In this work, an algorithm and accompanying Macaulay2 implementation are provided for computing nn-tet Concordance Factors on any phylogenetic network. We employ this algorithm on quintet Concordance Factors, summarizing 5-taxon gene trees, to explore identifiability of level-1 networks under the Network Multispecies Coalescent model. We show some additional network features become identifiable that are not through quartets. As identifiability is a necessary prerequisite to inference by any method, this lays a foundation for future inference work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.03544,
  title  = {Identifiability of phylogenetic networks and quintet concordance factors},
  author = {Joseph Cummings and Maize Curiel and Bryan Currie and Bryson Kagy and Udani Ranasinghe and John A. Rhodes},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.03544},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

31 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables