Efficient Quartet Representations of Trees and Applications to Supertree and Summary Methods

2015/12/16 by Ruth Davidson, R. Davidson, MaLyn Lawhorn +6
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Environmental Science · #92D15 #FOS: Biological sciences #Genetic diversity and population structure #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Species Distribution and Climate Change #msc:92D15 #q-bio.PE

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1512.05302

7 pages, minor revision

openalex publication_date 2015/12/16 · arxiv created 2016/12/06 · arxiv updated 2016/12/07 · openalex created_date 2022/08/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Quartet trees displayed by larger phylogenetic trees have long been used as inputs for species tree and supertree reconstruction. Computational constraints prevent the use of all displayed quartets in many practical problems due to the number of taxa. We introduce the notion of an Efficient Quartet System (EQS) to represent a phylogenetic tree with a subset of the quartets displayed by the tree. We show mathematically that the set of quartets obtained from a tree via an EQS contains all of the combinatorial information of the tree itself. Using performance tests on simulated datasets, we also demonstrate that using an EQS to reduce the number of quartets in pipelines for summary methods of species tree inference and supertree inference results in only small reductions in accuracy.

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