The Bourque distances for mutation trees of cancers

Katharina Jahn, Niko Beerenwinkel, Louxin Zhang
2021 Algorithms for Molecular Biology  
Background Mutation trees are rooted trees in which nodes are of arbitrary degree and labeled with a mutation set. These trees, also referred to as clonal trees, are used in computational oncology to represent the mutational history of tumours. Classical tree metrics such as the popular Robinson–Foulds distance are of limited use for the comparison of mutation trees. One reason is that mutation trees inferred with different methods or for different patients often contain different sets of
more » ... on labels. Results We generalize the Robinson–Foulds distance into a set of distance metrics called Bourque distances for comparing mutation trees. We show the basic version of the Bourque distance for mutation trees can be computed in linear time. We also make a connection between the Robinson–Foulds distance and the nearest neighbor interchange distance.
doi:10.1186/s13015-021-00188-3 pmid:34112201 fatcat:s5i6jze6wngqnimzar64ruuozm