Tree Containment With Soft Polytomies

Abstract

The Tree Containment problem has many important applications in the study of evolutionary history. Given a phylogenetic network N and a phylogenetic tree T whose leaves are labeled by a set of taxa, it asks if N and T are consistent. While the case of binary N and T has received considerable attention, the more practically relevant variant dealing with biological uncertainty has not. Such uncertainty manifests itself as high-degree vertices ("polytomies") that are "jokers" in the sense that they are compatible with any binary resolution of their children. Contrasting the binary case, we show that this problem, called Soft Tree Containment, is NP-hard, even if N is a binary, multi-labeled tree in which each taxon occurs at most thrice. On the other hand, we reduce the case that each label occurs at most twice to solving a 2-SAT instance of size O(|T|^3). This implies NP-hardness and polynomial-time solvability on reticulation-visible networks in which the maximum in-degree is bounded by three and two, respectively.