4.0 Article

Defining Binary Phylogenetic Trees Using Parsimony

Journal

ANNALS OF COMBINATORICS
Volume -, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

SPRINGER BASEL AG
DOI: 10.1007/s00026-022-00627-x

Keywords

Phylogenetic tree; maximum parsimony; Buneman theorem; X-splits

Funding

  1. Projekt DEAL

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Phylogenetic trees are important in evolutionary research. This study demonstrates that maximum parsimony can serve as a justified tree reconstruction criterion when the number of changes in the data is relatively small.
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 optimization criterion for such reconstructions is maximum parsimony. It is generally assumed that this criterion works well for data in which state changes are rare. In the present manuscript, we prove that each binary phylogenetic tree T with n >= 20k leaves is uniquely defined by the set A(k)(T), which consists of all characters with parsimony score k on T. This can be considered as a promising first step toward showing that maximum parsimony as a tree reconstruction criterion is justified when the number of changes in the data is relatively small.

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