Comparison of Galled Trees

TL;DR

This paper investigates the metric properties of various distance measures for galled trees, a type of evolutionary network, to determine their suitability for evaluating reconstruction methods.

Contribution

It establishes which distance measures are true metrics for galled trees, aiding in the assessment of reconstruction algorithms.

Findings

Certain distance measures are proven to be metrics for galled trees.

Some measures can be safely used to evaluate reconstruction methods.

The study clarifies the applicability of existing distance measures to galled trees.

Abstract

Galled trees, directed acyclic graphs that model evolutionary histories with isolated hybridization events, have become very popular due to both their biological significance and the existence of polynomial time algorithms for their reconstruction. In this paper we establish to which extent several distance measures for the comparison of evolutionary networks are metrics for galled trees, and hence when they can be safely used to evaluate galled tree reconstruction methods.