Related papers: A note on convex characters, Fibonacci numbers and…
Phylogenetic trees are used to model evolution: leaves are labelled to represent contemporary species ("taxa") and interior vertices represent extinct ancestors. Informally, convex characters are measurements on the contemporary species in…
Let $\mathcal{T}$ be an unrooted binary tree with $n$ distinctly labelled leaves. Deriving its name from the field of phylogenetics, a convex character on $\mathcal{T}$ is simply a partition of the leaves such that the minimal spanning…
Phylogenetic trees are frequently used to model evolution. Such trees are typically reconstructed from data like DNA, RNA, or protein alignments using methods based on criteria like maximum parsimony (amongst others). Maximum parsimony has…
Phylogenetic (i.e. leaf-labeled) trees play a fundamental role in evolutionary research. A typical problem is to reconstruct such trees from data like DNA alignments (whose columns are often referred to as characters), and a simple…
Estimating phylogenetic trees, which depict the relationships between different species, from aligned sequence data (such as DNA, RNA, or proteins) is one of the main aims of evolutionary biology. However, tree reconstruction criteria like…
In phylogenetics, a key problem is to construct evolutionary trees from collections of characters where, for a set X of species, a character is simply a function from X onto a set of states. In this context, a key concept is convexity,…
Given two phylogenetic trees on the same set of taxa X, the maximum parsimony distance d_MP is defined as the maximum, ranging over all characters c on X, of the absolute difference in parsimony score induced by c on the two trees. In this…
In this article we prove that the distance $d_{\mathrm{MP}}(T_1,T_2) = k$ between two unrooted binary phylogenetic trees $T_1, T_2$ on the same set of taxa can be defined by a character that is convex on one of $T_1, T_2$ and which has at…
We show that for any two values $\alpha, \beta >0 $ for which $\alpha+\beta>1$ then there is a value $N$ so that for all $n \geq N$ the following holds. For any binary phylogenetic tree $T$ on $n$ leaves there is a set of $\lfloor n^\alpha…
In phylogenetics, a central problem is to infer the evolutionary relationships between a set of species $X$; these relationships are often depicted via a phylogenetic tree -- a tree having its leaves univocally labeled by elements of $X$…
Phylogenetic trees play a key role in the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. Typically, they are derived from aligned sequence data (like DNA, RNA, or proteins) by using optimization criteria like, e.g., maximum parsimony (MP).…
The so-called binary perfect phylogeny with persistent characters has recently been thoroughly studied in computational biology as it is less restrictive than the well known binary perfect phylogeny. Here, we focus on the notion of (binary)…
In evolutionary biology, phylogenetic trees are commonly inferred from a set of characters (partitions) of a collection of biological entities (e.g., species or individuals in a population). Such characters naturally arise from molecular…
An L(2,1)-labeling of a graph $G$ is an assignment $f$ from the vertex set $V(G)$ to the set of nonnegative integers such that $|f(x)-f(y)|\ge 2$ if $x$ and $y$ are adjacent and $|f(x)-f(y)|\ge 1$ if $x$ and $y$ are at distance 2, for all…
Phylogenetic tree shapes capture fundamental signatures of evolution. We consider ``ranked'' tree shapes, which are equipped with a total order on the internal nodes compatible with the tree graph. Recent work has established an elegant…
A classical result, fundamental to evolutionary biology, states that an edge-weighted tree $T$ with leaf set $X$, positive edge weights, and no vertices of degree 2 can be uniquely reconstructed from the set of leaf-to-leaf distances…
Applying a method to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree from random data provides a way to detect whether that method has an inherent bias towards certain tree `shapes'. For maximum parsimony, applied to a sequence of random 2-state data, each…
A coloring of a tree is convex if the vertices that pertain to any color induce a connected subtree; a partial coloring (which assigns colors to some of the vertices) is convex if it can be completed to a convex (total) coloring. Convex…
In phylogenetic studies, biologists often wish to estimate the ancestral discrete character state at an interior vertex $v$ of an evolutionary tree $T$ from the states that are observed at the leaves of the tree. A simple and fast…
Construction of phylogenetic trees and networks for extant species from their characters represents one of the key problems in phylogenomics. While solution to this problem is not always uniquely defined and there exist multiple methods for…