English

The Shapley Value of Phylogenetic Trees

Quantitative Methods 2009-09-02 v2 Computer Science and Game Theory Combinatorics Populations and Evolution

Abstract

Every weighted tree corresponds naturally to a cooperative game that we call a "tree game"; it assigns to each subset of leaves the sum of the weights of the minimal subtree spanned by those leaves. In the context of phylogenetic trees, the leaves are species and this assignment captures the diversity present in the coalition of species considered. We consider the Shapley value of tree games and suggest a biological interpretation. We determine the linear transformation M that shows the dependence of the Shapley value on the edge weights of the tree, and we also compute a null space basis of M. Both depend on the "split counts" of the tree. Finally, we characterize the Shapley value on tree games by four axioms, a counterpart to Shapley's original theorem on the larger class of cooperative games.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.q-bio/0506034,
  title  = {The Shapley Value of Phylogenetic Trees},
  author = {Claus-Jochen Haake and Akemi Kashiwada and Francis Edward Su},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:q-bio/0506034},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

References added, and a section (calculating the Shapley value of a tree game from its subtrees) was removed for length reasons (request of referee) and may appear in another paper. 16 pages; related work at http://www.math.hmc.edu/~su/papers.html. Journal of Mathematical Biology, to appear. The original article is available at http://www.springerlink.com