Phylogenetic consensus networks: Computing a consensus of 1-nested phylogenetic networks [article]

Katharina T. Huber, Vincent Moulton, Andreas Spillner
2021 arXiv   pre-print
An important and well-studied problem in phylogenetics is to compute a consensus tree so as to summarize the common features within a collection of rooted phylogenetic trees, all whose leaf-sets are bijectively labeled by the same set (X) of species. More recently, however, it has become of interest to find a consensus for a collection of more general, rooted directed acyclic graphs all of whose sink-sets are bijectively labeled by (X), so called rooted phylogenetic networks. These networks are
more » ... used to analyse the evolution of species that cross with one another, such as plants and viruses. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for computing a consensus for a collection of so-called 1-nested phylogenetic networks. Our approach builds on a previous result by Roselló et al. that describes an encoding for any 1-nested phylogenetic network in terms of a collection of ordered pairs of subsets of (X).More specifically, we characterize those collections of ordered pairs that arise as the encoding of some 1-nested phylogenetic network, and then use this characterization to compute a consensus network for a collection of t 1-nested networks in O(t|X|^2+|X|^3) time. Applying our algorithm to a collection of phylogenetic trees yields the well-known majority rule consensus tree. Our approach leads to several new directions for futurework, and we expect that it should provide a useful new tool to help understand complex evolutionary scenarios.
arXiv:2107.09696v1 fatcat:4zdm67gwajbsjbybzyjtjof4yq