A dichotomy law for certain classes of phylogenetic networks

Abstract

Many classes of phylogenetic networks have been proposed in the literature. A feature of several of these classes is that if one restricts a network in the class to a subset of its leaves, then the resulting network may no longer lie within this class. This has implications for their biological applicability, since some species -- which are the leaves of an underlying evolutionary network -- may be missing (e.g., they may have become extinct, or there are no data available for them) or we may simply wish to focus attention on a subset of the species. On the other hand, certain classes of networks are `closed' when we restrict to subsets of leaves, such as (i) the classes of all phylogenetic networks or all phylogenetic trees; (ii) the classes of galled networks, simplicial networks, galled trees; and (iii) the classes of networks that have some parameter that is monotone-under-leaf-subsampling (e.g., the number of reticulations, height, etc.) bounded by some fixed value. It is easily shown that a closed subclass of phylogenetic trees is either all trees or a vanishingly small proportion of them (as the number of leaves grows). In this short paper, we explore whether this dichotomy phenomenon holds for other classes of phylogenetic networks, and their subclasses.