title: A note on the path interval distance.
abstract: The path interval distance accounts for global congruence between locally incongruent trees. We show that the path interval distance provides a lower bound for the nearest neighbor interchange distance. In contrast to the Robinson-Foulds distance, random pairs of trees are unlikely to be maximally distant from one another under the path interval distance. These features indicate that the path interval distance should play a role in phylogenomics where the comparison of trees on a fixed set of taxa is becoming increasingly important.
authors.affiliation: North Carolina State University, United States. Electronic address: janyivycoons@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jane Ivy
authors.initials: JI
authors.lastname: Coons
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 309 Lansing Hall Geneva, New York 14456, United States. Electronic address: rusinko@hws.edu.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rusinko
mesh_terms: D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010802:Phylogeny
keywords: Cophylogenetics; Phylogenetics; Tree metrics