On the equivalence of Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood on phylogenetic networks

Mareike Fischer, Parisa Bazargani
(Submitted on 26 May 2015)

Phylogenetic inference aims at reconstructing the evolutionary relationships of different species given some data (e.g. DNA, RNA or proteins). Traditionally, the relationships between species were assumed to be treelike, so the most frequently used phylogenetic inference methods like e.g. Maximum Parsimony or Maximum Likelihood were originally introduced to reconstruct phylogenetic trees. However, it has been well-known that some evolutionary events like hybridization or horizontal gene transfer cannot be represented by a tree but rather require a phylogenetic network. Therefore, current research seeks to adapt tree inference methods to networks. In the present paper, we analyze Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood on networks for various network definitions which have recently been introduced, and we investigate the well-known Tuffley and Steel equivalence result concerning these methods under the setting of a phylogenetic network.