Comparing phylogenetic trees using a minimum weight perfect matching

A phylogenetic tree represents historical evolutionary relationship between different species or organisms. There are various methods for reconstructing phylogenetic trees. Applying those techniques usually results in different trees for the same input data. An important problem is to determine how distant two trees reconstructed in such a way are from each other. Comparing phylogenetic trees is also useful in mining phylogenetic information databases. In this paper new metrics for comparing phylogenetic trees are suggested. These metrics are based on a minimum weight perfect matching in bipartite graphs and can be computed in a polynomial time. We study some properties of these metrics and compare them with methods previously known.