Generalized Tree Alignment

In computational phylogenetics, generalized tree alignment is the problem of producing a multiple sequence alignment and a phylogenetic tree on a set of sequences simultaneously, as opposed to separately.

Formally, Generalized tree alignment is the following optimization problem.

Input: A set and an edit distance function between sequences,

Output: A tree leaf-labeled by and labeled with sequences at the internal nodes, such that is minimized, where is the edit distance between the endpoints of .

Note that this is in contrast to tree alignment, where the tree is provided as input.


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