Mutation trees are rooted trees of arbitrary node degree in which each node is labeled with a mutation set. These trees, also referred to as clonal trees, are used in computational oncology to represent the mutational history of tumours. Classical tree metrics such as the popular Robinson--Foulds distance are of limited use for the comparison of mutation trees. One reason is that mutation trees inferred with different methods or for different patients usually contain different sets of mutation labels. Here, we generalize the Robinson--Foulds distance into a set of distance metrics called Bourque distances for comparing mutation trees. A connection between the Robinson--Foulds distance and the nearest neighbor interchange distance is also presented.

中文翻译：

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癌症突变树的布尔克距离

变异树是任意节点度的根树，其中每个节点都标记有变异集。这些树（也称为克隆树）在计算肿瘤学中用于表示肿瘤的突变史。诸如流行的Robinson-Foulds距离之类的经典树度量标准在比较变异树时用途有限。原因之一是用不同方法或针对不同患者推断的变异树通常包含不同的变异标记集。在这里，我们将Robinson-Foulds距离归纳为一组称为Bourque距离的距离度量，用于比较变异树。鲁宾逊-弗尔兹距离与最近的邻居互换距离之间也存在联系。