Facets of the Balanced Minimal Evolution Polytope

Abstract

A phylogenetic tree is a way to organize a finite set of species, individuals or other sources of related data. The species for which we have existing DNA data make up the set of leaves of the tree. The balanced minimal evolution method of creating phylogenetic trees can be formulated as a linear programming problem, minimizing an inner product over the vertices of the BME polytope. In this paper we undertake the first steps of describing the facets of this polytope.