Issue No. 01 - January-March (2009 vol. 6)
ISSN: 1545-5963
pp: 46-61
Gabriel Cardona , University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca
Mercè Llabrés , University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca
Francesc Rosselló , University of the Balearic Islands, Palma de Mallorca
Gabriel Valiente , Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona
ABSTRACT
The assessment of phylogenetic network reconstruction methods requires the ability to compare phylogenetic networks. This is the first in a series of papers devoted to the analysis and comparison of metrics for tree-child time consistent phylogenetic networks on the same set of taxa. In this paper, we study three metrics that have already been introduced in the literature: the Robinson-Foulds distance, the tripartitions distance and the $\mu$-distance. They generalize to networks the classical Robinson-Foulds or partition distance for phylogenetic trees. We analyze the behavior of these metrics by studying their least and largest values and when they achieve them. As a by-product of this study, we obtain tight bounds on the size of a tree-child time consistent phylogenetic network.
INDEX TERMS
Biology and genetics, Graph algorithms, Trees
CITATION

M. Llabrés, F. Rosselló, G. Valiente and G. Cardona, "Metrics for Phylogenetic Networks I: Generalizations of the Robinson-Foulds Metric," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, vol. 6, no. , pp. 46-61, 2008.
doi:10.1109/TCBB.2008.70