Bull Math Biol. 2026 Feb 21;88(3):43. doi: 10.1007/s11538-026-01606-6.
ABSTRACT
Rooted phylogenetic networks allow biologists to represent evolutionary relationships between present-day species by revealing ancestral speciation and hybridization events. A convenient and well-studied class of such networks are ‘tree-child networks’ and a ‘ranking’ of such a network is a temporal ordering of the ancestral speciation and hybridization events. In this short note, we investigate the question of counting such rankings on any given binary (or semi-binary) tree-child network. We also investigate the relationship between rankable tree-child networks and the class of ‘normal’ networks. Finally, we provide an explicit asymptotic expression for the expected number of rankings of a tree-child network chosen uniformly at random.
PMID:41721936 | DOI:10.1007/s11538-026-01606-6
