English

Reconstructing Trees from Subtree Weights

Combinatorics 2007-05-23 v1 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

The tree-metric theorem provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a dissimilarity matrix to be a tree metric, and has served as the foundation for numerous distance-based reconstruction methods in phylogenetics. Our main result is an extension of the tree-metric theorem to more general dissimilarity maps. In particular, we show that a tree with n leaves is reconstructible from the weights of the m-leaf subtrees provided that n \geq 2m-1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0311156,
  title  = {Reconstructing Trees from Subtree Weights},
  author = {Lior Pachter and David E Speyer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0311156},
  year   = {2007}
}