A Metric on the Space of Partly Reduced Phylogenetic Networks

Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allow for the representation of evolutionary events acting at the population level, such as recombination between genes, hybridization between lineages, and horizontal gene transfer. The researchers have designed several measures for computing the dissimilarity between two phylogenetic networks, and each measure has been proven to be a metric on a special kind of phylogenetic networks. However, none of the existing measures is a metric on the space of partly reduced phylogenetic networks. In this paper, we provide a metric, d (e)-distance, on the space of partly reduced phylogenetic networks, which is polynomial-time computable.