Improved Approximation Algorithm for Maximum Agreement Forest of Two Trees

Given two rooted binary phylogenetic trees with identical leaf label-set, the Maximum Agreement Forest (Maf) problem asks for a largest common subforest of these two trees. This problem is known to be NP-complete and MAX SNP-hard, and the previously best approximation algorithm for this problem has a ratio 3. In this paper, we present an improved 2.5-approximation algorithm for the Maf problem on two rooted binary phylogenetic trees.

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