Metrics for phylogenetic networks I: generalizations of the Robinson-Foulds metric

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.