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Published Online: 11 January 2024

Consensus Tree Under the Ancestor–Descendant Distance is NP-Hard

Publication: Journal of Computational Biology
Volume 31, Issue Number 1

Abstract

Due to uncertainty in tumor phylogeny inference from sequencing data, many methods infer multiple, equally plausible phylogenies for the same cancer. To summarize the solution space T of tumor phylogenies, consensus tree methods seek a single best representative tree S under a specified pairwise tree distance function. One such distance function is the ancestor–descendant (AD) distance d(T,T) , which equals the size of the symmetric difference of the transitive closures of the edge sets E(T) and E(T) . Here, we show that finding a consensus tree S for tumor phylogenies T that minimizes the total AD distance TTd(S,T) is NP-hard.

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cover image Journal of Computational Biology
Journal of Computational Biology
Volume 31Issue Number 1January 2024
Pages: 58 - 70
PubMed: 38010616

History

Published online: 11 January 2024
Published in print: January 2024
Published ahead of print: 28 November 2023

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Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.
Cancer Center at Illinois, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.

Notes

Address correspondence to: Dr. Mohammed El-Kebir, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA [email protected]

Authors' Contributions

Y.Q. Conceptualization, formal analysis, and writing-original draft. M.E.-K.: Conceptualization, validation, writing–review, and editing.

Author Disclosure Statement

The authors declare they have no conflicting financial interests.

Funding Information

M.E.-K. was supported by the National Science Foundation (CCF-2046488) as well as funding from the Cancer Center at Illinois.

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