Distinguished minimal topological lassos

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Abstract: A classical result in distance based tree-reconstruction characterizes when for a distance D on some finite set X there exist a uniquely determined dendrogram on X (essentially a rooted tree T=(V,E) with leaf set X and no degree two vertices but possibly the root and an edge weighting omega:EomathbbRgeq0) such that the distance D(T,omega) induced by (T,omega) on X is D. Moreover, algorithms that quickly reconstruct (T,omega) from D in this case are known. However in many areas where dendrograms are being constructed such as Computational Biology not all distances on X are always available implying that the sought after dendrogram need not be uniquely determined anymore by the available distances with regards to topology of the underlying tree, edge-weighting, or both. To better understand the structural properties a set cLsubseteqXchoose2 has to satisfy to overcome this problem, various types of lassos have been introduced. Here, we focus on the question of when a lasso uniquely determines the topology of a dendrogram's underlying tree, that is, it is a topological lasso for that tree. We show that any set-inclusion minimal topological lasso for such a tree T can be transformed into a 'distinguished' minimal topological lasso cL for T, that is, the graph (X,cL) is a claw-free block graph. Furthermore, we characterize such lassos in terms of the novel concept of a cluster marker map for T and present results concerning the heritability of such lassos in the context of the subtree and supertree problems.












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