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Updated: Jun 13, 2026

A Practical Guide to Phylogenetics for Nonexperts
Published on: February 5, 2014
A metric on the space of reduced phylogenetic networks
1Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, MS 132, Houston, TX 77005, USA. nakhleh@cs.rice.edu
Abstract:
Phylogenetic networks are leaf-labeled, rooted, acyclic, and directed graphs that are used to model reticulate evolutionary histories. Several measures for quantifying the topological dissimilarity between two phylogenetic networks have been devised, each of which was proven to be a metric on certain restricted classes of phylogenetic networks. A biologically motivated class of phylogenetic networks, namely, reduced phylogenetic networks, was recently introduced. None of the existing measures is a metric on the space of reduced phylogenetic networks. In this paper, we provide a metric on the space of reduced phylogenetic networks that is computable in time polynomial in the size of the networks.
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