A multi-labeled tree, or MUL-tree, is a phylogenetic tree where two or more leaves share a label, e.g., a species name. A MUL-tree can imply multiple conflicting phylogenetic relationships for the same set of taxa, but can also contain conflict-free information that is of interest and yet is not obvious. We define the information content of a MUL-tree T as the set of all conflict-free quartet topologies implied by T, and define the maximal reduced form of T as the smallest tree that can be obtained from T by pruning leaves and contracting edges while retaining the same information content. We show that any two MUL-trees with the same information content exhibit the same reduced form. This introduces an equivalence relation among MUL-trees with potential applications to comparing MUL-trees. We present an efficient algorithm to reduce a MUL-tree to its maximally reduced form and evaluate its performance on empirical datasets in terms of both quality of the reduced tree and the degree of data reduction achieved. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.
CITATION STYLE
Deepak, A., Fernández-Baca, D., & McMahon, M. M. (2012). Extracting conflict-free information from multi-labeled trees. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 7534 LNBI, pp. 81–92). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33122-0_7
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