Tree Buckets and the Reconstruction of Pairs of Phylogenetic Trees

Abstract

Phylogenetic trees are used in evolutionary biology to represent the evolutionary history of a collection of taxa. As we have incomplete information about any evolutionary history, recovering trees from partial information is a focus of phylogenetic combinatorics. However, in some cases the available data does not describe a single phylogenetic tree. We consider recovery of pairs of phylogenetic trees from their combined subtrees with $k$ leaves, which we call a $k$-bucket. We establish the exact cases in which these pairs of trees are recoverable from their subtrees with a single leaf removed, both when just considering the structure of the trees, and when additionally considering the set of taxa on the leaves. We also consider recovery of pairs of trees with labelled leaves from their rooted triples, and establish that they are recoverable up to a sequence of subtree swaps.