2016/03/10 by Dimitris Papamichail, Angela Huang, Papamichail, Dimitris +6
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Plant and Fungal Species Descriptions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1603.03315
openalex publication_date 2016/03/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Construction of phylogenetic trees has traditionally focused on binary trees where all species appear on leaves, a problem for which numerous efficient solutions have been developed. Certain application domains though, such as viral evolution and transmission, paleontology, linguistics, and phylogenetic stemmatics, often require phylogeny inference that involves placing input species on ancestral tree nodes (live phylogeny), and polytomies. These requirements, despite their prevalence, lead to computationally harder algorithmic solutions and have been sparsely examined in the literature to date. In this article we prove some unique properties of most parsimonious live phylogenetic trees with polytomies, and describe novel algorithms to find the such trees without resorting to exhaustive enumeration of all possible tree topologies.