Rooted Maximum Agreement Supertrees

• Authors: Jesper Jansson;Joseph H. K. Ng;Kunihiko Sadakane;Wing-Kin Sung
• Venue: Algorithmica
• Year: 2005

Given a set $\T$ of rooted, unordered trees, where each $T_i \in \T$ is distinctly leaf-labeled by a set $\Lambda(T_i)$ and where the sets $\Lambda(T_i)$ may overlap, the maximum agreement supertree problem~(MASP) is to construct a distinctly leaf-labeled tree $Q$ with leaf set $\Lambda(Q) \subseteq $\cup$_{T_i \in \T} \Lambda(T_i)$ such that $|\Lambda(Q)|$ is maximized and for each $T_i \in \T$, the topological restriction of $T_i$ to $\Lambda(Q)$ is isomorphic to the topological restriction of $Q$ to $\Lambda(T_i)$. Let $n = \left| $\cup$_{T_i \in \T} \Lambda(T_i)\right|$, $k = |\T|$, and $D = \max_{T_i \in \T}\{\deg(T_i)\}$. We first show that MASP with $k = 2$ can be solved in $O(\sqrt{D} n \log (2n/D))$ time, which is $O(n \log n)$ when $D = O(1)$ and $O(n^{1.5})$ when $D$ is unrestricted. We then present an algorithm for MASP with $D = 2$ whose running time is polynomial if $k = O(1)$. On the other hand, we prove that MASP is NP-hard for any fixed $k \geq 3$ when $D$ is unrestricted, and also NP-hard for any fixed $D \geq 2$ when $k$ is unrestricted even if each input tree is required to contain at most three leaves. Finally, we describe a polynomial-time $(n/\!\log n)$-approximation algorithm for MASP.