Reticulation-Aware Dissimilarities for Phylogenetic Networks

A new family of phylogenetic network dissimilarities separates reticulation disagreement from tree-like disagreement, yielding pseudometrics on rooted binary networks and metrics on binary level-1 networks.

• Why it matters: Existing network dissimilarities may not distinguish hybridization or horizontal gene transfer errors from tree-structure errors, limiting accurate comparison and summary of inferred phylogenetic networks.
• What they did: The authors introduce reticulation-aware measures, prove pseudometricity on rooted binary phylogenetic networks on a fixed taxon set, and show two instantiations become metrics on binary level-1 networks.
• The result: Empirical and calibration experiments show the measures stay sensitive to reticulation errors as network size increases and respond to changes in hybrid identity and parental placement, implemented in PhyNetPy.

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