Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA) Vectors can Identify Reticulation Events even in Multifurcated Trees

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Hauptverfasser: Markin, Alexey, Anderson, Tavis K.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Markin, Alexey
Anderson, Tavis K.
author_facet Markin, Alexey
Anderson, Tavis K.
contents Recently, a new vector encoding, Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA), was introduced that represents $n$-leaf phylogenetic trees as $n-1$ length integer vectors by recording the placement location of each leaf. Both encoding and decoding of trees run in linear time and depend on a fixed ordering of the leaves. Here, we investigate the connection between OLA vectors and the maximum acyclic agreement forest (MAAF) problem. A MAAF represents an optimal breakdown of $k$ trees into reticulation-free subtrees, with the roots of these subtrees representing reticulation events. We introduce a corrected OLA distance index over OLA vectors of $k$ trees, which is easily computable in linear time. We prove that the corrected OLA distance corresponds to the size of a MAAF, given an optimal leaf ordering that minimizes that distance. Additionally, a MAAF can be easily reconstructed from optimal OLA vectors. We expand these results to multifurcated trees: we introduce an $O(kn \cdot m\log m)$ algorithm that optimally resolves a set of multifurcated trees given a leaf-ordering, where $m$ is the size of a largest multifurcation, and show that trees resolved via this algorithm also minimize the size of a MAAF. These results suggest a new approach to fast computation of phylogenetic networks and identification of reticulation events via random permutations of leaves. Additionally, in the case of microbial evolution, a natural ordering of leaves is often given by the sample collection date, which means that under mild assumptions, reticulation events can be identified in polynomial time on such datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_16405
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA) Vectors can Identify Reticulation Events even in Multifurcated Trees
Markin, Alexey
Anderson, Tavis K.
Populations and Evolution
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
05C05, 68R10, 92B10
F.2.2; G.2.1; G.2.2
Recently, a new vector encoding, Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA), was introduced that represents $n$-leaf phylogenetic trees as $n-1$ length integer vectors by recording the placement location of each leaf. Both encoding and decoding of trees run in linear time and depend on a fixed ordering of the leaves. Here, we investigate the connection between OLA vectors and the maximum acyclic agreement forest (MAAF) problem. A MAAF represents an optimal breakdown of $k$ trees into reticulation-free subtrees, with the roots of these subtrees representing reticulation events. We introduce a corrected OLA distance index over OLA vectors of $k$ trees, which is easily computable in linear time. We prove that the corrected OLA distance corresponds to the size of a MAAF, given an optimal leaf ordering that minimizes that distance. Additionally, a MAAF can be easily reconstructed from optimal OLA vectors. We expand these results to multifurcated trees: we introduce an $O(kn \cdot m\log m)$ algorithm that optimally resolves a set of multifurcated trees given a leaf-ordering, where $m$ is the size of a largest multifurcation, and show that trees resolved via this algorithm also minimize the size of a MAAF. These results suggest a new approach to fast computation of phylogenetic networks and identification of reticulation events via random permutations of leaves. Additionally, in the case of microbial evolution, a natural ordering of leaves is often given by the sample collection date, which means that under mild assumptions, reticulation events can be identified in polynomial time on such datasets.
title Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA) Vectors can Identify Reticulation Events even in Multifurcated Trees
topic Populations and Evolution
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
05C05, 68R10, 92B10
F.2.2; G.2.1; G.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16405