Abstract

Doc number: S18

Abstract: The triplet distance is a distance measure that compares two rooted trees on the same set of leaves by enumerating all sub-sets of three leaves and counting how often the induced topologies of the tree are equal or different. We present an algorithm that computes the triplet distance between two rooted binary trees in time O (n log2 n ). The algorithm is related to an algorithm for computing the quartet distance between two unrooted binary trees in time O (n log n ). While the quartet distance algorithm has a very severe overhead in the asymptotic time complexity that makes it impractical compared to O (n2 ) time algorithms, we show through experiments that the triplet distance algorithm can be implemented to give a competitive wall-time running time.

Details

Title
A practical O (n log2 n ) time algorithm for computing the triplet distance on binary trees
Author
Sand, Andreas; Brodal, Gerth Stølting; Fagerberg, Rolf; Pedersen, Christian NS; Mailund, Thomas
Pages
S18
Publication year
2013
Publication date
2013
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
e-ISSN
14712105
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1271616392
Copyright
© 2013 Sand et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.