Phylogenetic information complexity: is testing a tree easier than finding it?

ABSTRACT

Phylogenetic trees describe the evolutionary history of a group of present-day species from a common ancestor. These trees are typically reconstructed from aligned DNA sequence data. In this paper we analytically address the following question Is the amount of sequence data required to accurately reconstruct a tree significantly more than the amount required to test whether or not a candidate tree was the 'true' tree? By 'significantly', we mean that the two quantities do not behave the same way as a function of the number of species being considered. We prove that, for a certain type of model, the amount of information required is not significantly different; while for another type of model, the information required to test a tree is independent of the number of leaves, while that required to reconstruct it grows with this number. Our results combine probabilistic and combinatorial arguments.