Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Rooted phylogenetic networks allow biologists to represent evolutionary relationships between present-day species by revealing ancestral speciation and hybridization events. A convenient and well-studied class of such networks are 'tree-child networks' and a 'ranking' of such a network is a temporal ordering of the ancestral speciation and hybridization events. In this short note, we investigate the question of counting such rankings on any given binary (or semi-binary) tree-child network. We also investigate the relationship between rankable tree-child networks and the class of 'normal' networks. Finally, we provide an explicit asymptotic expression for the expected number of rankings of a tree-child network chosen uniformly at random.
Source: Bulletin of Mathematical Biology
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Mike Steel
Institution: University of Canterbury
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,090
Funder: Marsden Fund
Award: G4694145762
OpenAlex ID: W7130818834