Tropical mixtures of star tree metrics

Abstract

We study tree metrics that can be realized as a mixture of two star tree metrics. We prove that the only trees admitting such a decomposition are the ones coming from a tree with at most one internal edge, and whose weight satisfies certain linear inequalities. We also characterize the fibers of the corresponding mixture map. In addition, we discuss the general framework of tropical secant varieties and we interpret our results within this setting. Finally, we show that the set of tree metric ranks of metrics on $n$ taxa is unbounded.