Nodal distances for rooted phylogenetic trees

Dissimilarity measures for (possibly weighted) phylogenetic trees based on the comparison of their vectors of path lengths between pairs of taxa, have been present in the systematics literature since the early seventies. For rooted phylogenetic trees, however, these vectors can only separate non-weighted binary trees, and therefore these dissimilarity measures are metrics only on this class of rooted phylogenetic trees. In this paper we overcome this problem, by splitting in a suitable way each path length between two taxa into two lengths. We prove that the resulting splitted path lengths matrices single out arbitrary rooted phylogenetic trees with nested taxa and arcs weighted in the set of positive real numbers. This allows the definition of metrics on this general class of rooted phylogenetic trees by comparing these matrices through metrics in spaces $${\mathcal{M}_n(\mathbb {R})}$$ of real-valued n × n matrices. We conclude this paper by establishing some basic facts about the metrics for non-weighted phylogenetic trees defined in this way using Lp metrics on $${\mathcal{M}_n(\mathbb {R})}$$, with $${p \in \mathbb {R}_{ >0 }}$$.