Trees and terraces.

Type of content
Theses / Dissertations
Publisher's DOI/URI
Thesis discipline
Mathematics
Degree name
Master of Science
Publisher
University of Canterbury
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Language
English
Date
2016
Authors
Mark, Sarah Jayne
Abstract

The reconstruction of evolutionary trees from data sets on overlapping sets of species is a central problem in phylogenetics. Provided that the tree reconstructed for each subset of species is rooted and that these trees fit together consistently, the space of all parent trees that display' these trees was recently shown to satisfy the following property: there exists a path from any one parent tree to any other parent tree by a sequence of local rearrangements (nearest neighbour interchanges) so that each intermediate tree also lies in this same tree space. However, the proof of this result uses a non-constructive argument. In this thesis we describe a specific, polynomial-time procedure for navigating from any given parent tree to another while remaining in this tree space. We then investigate a related problem, the conditions under which there is only one parent tree. These results are of particular relevance to the recent study of phylogenetic terraces'.

Description
Citation
Keywords
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Rights
All Right Reserved