English

The isometry group of phylogenetic tree space is $S_n$

Combinatorics 2019-04-02 v2 Metric Geometry Populations and Evolution

Abstract

A phylogenetic tree is an acyclic graph with distinctly labeled leaves, whose internal edges have a positive weight. Given a set of n leaves, the collection of all phylogenetic trees with this leaf set can be assembled into a metric cube complex known as phylogenetic tree space, or Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann tree space. In this largely combinatorial paper, we show that the isometry group of this space is the symmetric group on n elements. This fact is relevant to distance-based analyses of phylogenetic tree sets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.02982,
  title  = {The isometry group of phylogenetic tree space is $S_n$},
  author = {Gillian Grindstaff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02982},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages, 1 figure