Computing the Quartet Distance Between Evolutionary Trees of Bounded Degree

Abstract

We present an algorithm for calculating the quartet distance between two evolutionary trees of bounded degree on a common set of n species. The previous best algorithm has running time O(d2n2) when considering trees, where no node is of more than degree d. The algorithm developed herein has running time O(d9n logn)) which makes it the first algorithm for computing the quartet distance between non-binary trees which has a sub-quadratic worst case running time.