The Majority-rule Paradigm in Supertree Construction

The problem of aggregating the individual preferences of a group of "voters" into a group consensus preference has been studied for many years. Indeed, mathematical investigations of consensus problems go back to the contributions of Borda (1784) and Condorcet (1785), and are still frequently cited today. One method, the compelling majority-rule consensus, is so simple (stick something in the output if it is in more than half of the input) that it seems nothing really interesting can be said about it, yet hundreds of papers have been, and are being, written about majority-rule and its variations.

This presentation will give an introduction to some results pertaining to the use of the majority-rule paradigm in systematic biology for finding a consensus for a set of phylogenetic trees (hierarchies) defined on the same set of species; and for finding a supertree of hierarchies defined on different but overlapping sets of species.

Event Topic

Discrete Applied Math Seminar