Nodal distances for rooted phylogenetic trees

Abstract: Dissimilarity measures for (possibly weighted) phylogenetic trees based on the comparison of their vectors of path lengths between pairs of taxa, have been present in the systematics literature since the early seventies. But, as far as rooted phylogenetic trees goes, these vectors can only separate non-weighted binary trees, and therefore these dissimilarity measures are metrics only on this class. In this paper we overcome this problem, by splitting in a suitable way each path length between two taxa into two lengths. We prove that the resulting splitted path lengths matrices single out arbitrary rooted phylogenetic trees with nested taxa and arcs weighted in the set of positive real numbers. This allows the definition of metrics on this general class by comparing these matrices by means of metrics in spaces of real-valued $n\times n$ matrices. We conclude this paper by establishing some basic facts about the metrics for non-weighted phylogenetic trees defined in this way using $L^p$ metrics on these spaces of matrices.