Types of Stickiness in BHV Phylogenetic Tree Spaces and Their Degree

Abstract

It has been observed that the sample mean of certain probability distributions in Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann (BHV) phylogenetic spaces is confined to a lower-dimensional subspace for large enough sample size. This non-standard behavior has been called stickiness and poses difficulties in statistical applications when comparing samples of sticky distributions. We extend previous results on stickiness to show the equivalence of this sampling behavior to topological conditions in the special case of BHV spaces. Furthermore, we propose to alleviate statistical comparision of sticky distributions by including the directional derivatives of the Fr\'echet function: the degree of stickiness.