Scanning Phylogenetic Networks is NP-hard

Vincent Berry (1) , Celine Scornavacca (2) , Mathias Weller (3)

1 MAB - Méthodes et Algorithmes pour la Bioinformatique
2 IBC - Institut de Biologie Computationnelle
3 LIGM - Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge

Phylogenetic networks are rooted directed acyclic graphs used to depict the evolution of a set of species in the presence of reticulate events. Reconstructing these networks from molecular data is challenging and current algorithms fail to scale up to genome-wide data. In this paper, we introduce a new width measure intended to help design faster parameterized algorithms for this task. We study its relation with other width measures and problems in graph theory and finally prove that deciding it is NP-complete, even for very restricted classes of networks.

Domaines: Complexité [cs.CC]; Bio-informatique [q-bio.QM]

Vincent Berry, Celine Scornavacca, Mathias Weller. Scanning Phylogenetic Networks is NP-hard. SOFSEM 2020 - 46th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, Jan 2020, Limassol, Cyprus. pp.519-530, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-38919-2_42⟩. ⟨hal-02353161v2⟩