Imputing phylogenetic trees using tropical polytopes over the space of phylogenetic trees

Abstract: When we apply comparative phylogenetic analyses to genome data, it is a well-known problem and challenge that some of given species (or taxa) often have missing genes. In such a case, we have to impute a missing part of a gene tree from a sample of gene trees. In this short paper we propose a novel method to infer a missing part of a phylogenetic tree using an analogue of a classical linear regression in the setting of tropical geometry. In our approach, we consider a tropical polytope, a convex hull with respect to the tropical metric closest to the data points. We show a condition that we can guarantee that an estimated tree from our method has at most four Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance from the ground truth and computational experiments with simulated data show our method works well.