English

On the Weighted Quartet Consensus problem

Data Structures and Algorithms 2017-05-12 v2

Abstract

In phylogenetics, the consensus problem consists in summarizing a set of phylogenetic trees that all classify the same set of species into a single tree. Several definitions of consensus exist in the literature; in this paper we focus on the Weighted Quartet Consensus problem, a problem with unknown complexity status so far. Here we prove that the Weighted Quartet Consensus problem is NP-hard and we give a 1/2-factor approximation for this problem. During the process, we propose a derandomization procedure of a previously known randomized 1/3-factor approximation. We also investigate the fixed-parameter tractability of this problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.00505,
  title  = {On the Weighted Quartet Consensus problem},
  author = {Manuel Lafond and Céline Scornavacca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.00505},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:08:40.173Z