The Full Steiner Tree Problem in Phylogeny

Motivated by the reconstruction of phylogenetic tree in biology, we study the full Steiner tree problem in this paper. Given a complete graph G = (V, E) with a length function on E and a proper subset R ? V , the problem is to find a full Steiner tree of minimum length in G, which is a kind of Steiner tree with all the vertices of R as its leaves. In this paper, we show that this problem is NP-complete and MAX SNP-hard, even when the lengths of the edges are restricted to either 1 or 2. For the instances with lengths either 1 or 2, we give a 5/3-approximation algorithm to find an approximate solution for the problem.

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