An interchange property for the rooted phylogenetic subnet diversity on phylogenetic networks.

Abstract

Faith's Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) on rooted phylogenetic trees satisfies the so-called strong exchange property that guarantees that, for every two sets of leaves of different cardinalities, a leaf can always be moved from the larger set to the smaller set in such a way that the sum of the PD values does not decrease. This strong exchange property entails a simple polynomial-time greedy solution to the PD optimization problem on rooted phylogenetic trees. In this paper we obtain an exchange property for the rooted Phylogenetic Subnet Diversity (rPSD) on rooted phylogenetic networks, which involves a more complicated exchange of leaves. We derive from it a polynomial-time greedy solution to the rPSD optimization problem on rooted semibinary level-2 phylogenetic networks.