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The problem of constructing a minimally resolved phylogenetic supertree (i.e., having the smallest possible number of internal nodes) that contains all of the rooted triplets from a consistent set R is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we prove that constructing a phylogenetic tree consistent with R that contains the minimum number of additional rooted triplets is also NP-hard, and develop exact, exponential-time algorithms for both problems. The new algorithms are applied to construct two variants of the local consensus tree; for any set S of phylogenetic trees over some leaf label set L, this gives a minimal phylogenetic tree over L that contains every rooted triplet present in all trees in S, where ``minimal'' means either having the smallest possible number of internal nodes or the smallest possible number of rooted triplets. The second variant generalizes the RV-II tree, introduced by Kannan, Warnow, and Yooseph in 1998.
@InProceedings{jansson_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2016.53,
author = {Jansson, Jesper and Sung, Wing-Kin},
title = {{Minimal Phylogenetic Supertrees and Local Consensus Trees}},
booktitle = {41st International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2016)},
pages = {53:1--53:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-016-3},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2016},
volume = {58},
editor = {Faliszewski, Piotr and Muscholl, Anca and Niedermeier, Rolf},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2016.53},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-64653},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2016.53},
annote = {Keywords: phylogenetic tree, rooted triplet, local consensus, minimal supertree, computational complexity, bioinformatics}
}