Patching up \(X\)-trees (Q1306736)

The paper studies the the following fundamental problem: when can one reconstruct a partially labelled tree from some of its subtrees? This problem is well studied in diverse fields that use classification: phylogeny, historical linguistics, and stemmatology. The paper shows that reconstruction from special kinds of subtrees, which have four leaves, is an equivalent problem. This latter problem is completely solved in the case when the number of subtrees on four leaves is as small as possible.