scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1113969
Determining the evolutionary history of a set \(S\) of objects (taxa or species) is a problem with applications in a number of domains such as biology, comparative linguistics, and literature. Primary data used to compare different taxa (whether biological species, populations, or languages) can be described using characters. Characters describe aspects of the elements of \(S\). Typically, a character \(c\) partitions the set \(S\) into equivalence classes and can thus be described as a function \(c: S\to Z_r\), where \(Z_r= \{0,1,\dots, r-1\}\). The value \(c(s)\) is called the character state of \(c\) on \(s\), where \(s\in S\). We describe tree constructions when characters are permitted to have more than one character state on a given object. We call this the polymorphism problem. The definition of a character is thus extended to \(c: S\to 2^Z- \{\emptyset\}\). A character which is permitted to have more than one state on a given object will be called a polymorphic character, and one which can have only one state for every object is referred to as a monomorphic character. Polymorphism is a well-documented phenomenon in several areas like biology and historical linguistics. Our further discussions will be restricted to historical linguistics, where we are interested in studying the evolution of languages. The techniques discussed here can be used for some biological data sets as well. Other techniques for dealing with biological data sets are mentioned. The major contribution of this paper is a methodology for inferring perfect phylogenies from monomorphic and polymorphic characters. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0880.00055].
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