Visualizing Co-Phylogenetic Reconciliations

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel hybrid visualization method for co-phylogenetic tree reconciliations, ensuring clear, time-consistent representations and addressing crossing minimization through heuristics.

Contribution

It introduces a new visualization approach combining space-filling and node-link methods, guaranteeing unambiguous, downward representations for time-consistent reconciliations.

Findings

Characterization of planar instances in co-phylogenetic reconciliations

Complexity analysis of crossing minimization problem

Heuristics for producing low-crossing visualizations

Abstract

We introduce a hybrid metaphor for the visualization of the reconciliations of co-phylogenetic trees, that are mappings among the nodes of two trees. The typical application is the visualization of the co-evolution of hosts and parasites in biology. Our strategy combines a space-filling and a node-link approach. Differently from traditional methods, it guarantees an unambiguous and `downward' representation whenever the reconciliation is time-consistent (i.e., meaningful). We address the problem of the minimization of the number of crossings in the representation, by giving a characterization of planar instances and by establishing the complexity of the problem. Finally, we propose heuristics for computing representations with few crossings.