Novel Algorithm for Comparing Phylogenetic Trees with Different but Overlapping Taxa

Abstract

Comparing phylogenetic trees is a prominent problem widely used in applications such as clustering and building the Tree of Life. While there are many well-developed distance measures for phylogenetic trees defined on the same set of taxa, the situation is contrasting for trees defined on different but mutually overlapping sets of taxa. This paper presents a new polynomial-time algorithm for completing phylogenetic trees and computing the distance between trees defined on different but overlapping sets of taxa. This novel approach considers both the branch lengths and the topology of the phylogenetic trees being compared. We demonstrate that the distance measure applied to completed trees is a metric and provide several properties of the new method, including its symmetrical nature in tree completion.