# When Many Trees Go to War: On Sets of Phylogenetic Trees With Almost No Common Structure

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the minimum reticulations needed in phylogenetic networks to display multiple trees with minimal common structure, revealing bounds that depend on the number of trees and leaves.

## Contribution

It establishes new bounds on the reticulations required for sets of phylogenetic trees with little shared structure, extending understanding of network complexity.

## Key findings

- For small sets of trees, nearly linear reticulations are necessary.
- Sets of trees with no common structure require almost the trivial number of reticulations.
- For larger sets, the reticulation bounds grow proportionally to n log n.

## Abstract

It is known that any two trees on the same $n$ leaves can be displayed by a network with $n-2$ reticulations, and there are two trees that cannot be displayed by a network with fewer reticulations. But how many reticulations are needed to display multiple trees? For any set of $t$ trees on $n$ leaves, there is a trivial network with $(t - 1)n$ reticulations that displays them. To do better, we have to exploit common structure of the trees to embed non-trivial subtrees of different trees into the same part of the network. In this paper, we show that for $t \in o(\sqrt{\lg n})$, there is a set of $t$ trees with virtually no common structure that could be exploited. More precisely, we show for any $t\in o(\sqrt{\lg n})$, there are $t$ trees such that any network displaying them has $(t-1)n - o(n)$ reticulations. For $t \in o(\lg n)$, we obtain a slightly weaker bound. We also prove that already for $t = c\lg n$, for any constant $c > 0$, there is a set of $t$ trees that cannot be displayed by a network with $o(n \lg n)$ reticulations, matching up to constant factors the known upper bound of $O(n \lg n)$ reticulations sufficient to display \emph{all} trees with $n$ leaves. These results are based on simple counting arguments and extend to unrooted networks and trees.