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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2023.07.17.549375

Consensus Tree under the Ancestor-Descendant Distance is NP-hard

Qi, Y.·El-Kebir, M.
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Abstract

Due to uncertainty in tumor phylogeny inference from sequencing data, many methods infer multiple, equally-plausible phylogenies for the same cancer. To summarize the solution space [T] of tumor phylogenies, consensus tree methods seek a single best representative tree S under a specified pairwise tree distance function. One such distance function is the ancestor-descendant (AD) distance d (T, T'), which equals the symmetric difference of the transitive closures of the edge sets E (T) and E (T'). Here, we show that finding a consensus tree S for tumor phylogenies [T] that minimizes the total AD distance {sum}T [isin][T] d (S, T) is NP-hard.

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Qi, Y., El-Kebir, M.. 2023-07-19. Consensus Tree under the Ancestor-Descendant Distance is NP-hard. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.17.549375

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