Glossary

Split

A split is the division of a collection of taxa into disjoint sets S and Sc, which is represented as SSc. Note that the removal of any edge of the tree will produce two smaller trees, so that if taxa are assigned to the leaves of a tree, the edge's removal will naturally divide the taxa into two disjoint sets, thus forming a split.

Thus, we can represent any edge of a phylogeny with the split to which it corresponds. Conversely, a character also corresponds to a split, as it divides all possible taxa into two disjoint sets. Thus, a common phylogenetic problem is to use the notion of split to construct a phylogeny given a collection of characters, often encoded by a character table.

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