Improved approximation algorithm for maximum agreement forest of two rooted binary phylogenetic trees

Abstract

Given two rooted binary phylogenetic trees with identical leaf label-set, the maximum agreement forest (MAF) problem asks for a largest common subforest of the two trees. This problem has been studied extensively in the literature, and has been known to be NP-complete and MAX SNP-hard. The previously best ratio of approximation algorithms for this problem is 3. In this paper, we make full use of the special relations among leaves in phylogenetic trees and present an approximation algorithm with ratio 2.5 for the MAF problem on two rooted binary phylogenetic trees.