Mutation trees are rooted trees in which nodes are of arbitrary degree and 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 often contain different sets of mutation labels. We generalize the Robinson–Foulds distance into a set of distance metrics called Bourque distances for comparing mutation trees. We show the basic version of the Bourque distance for mutation trees can be computed in linear time. We also make a connection between the Robinson–Foulds distance and the nearest neighbor interchange distance.

中文翻译：

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癌症突变树的布尔克距离

变异树是有根的树，其中节点是任意度数并用变异集标记。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历史。经典的树度量，例如流行的 Robinson-Foulds 距离，在比较突变树方面的用途有限。一个原因是使用不同方法或针对不同患者推断的突变树通常包含不同的突变标签集。我们将 Robinson-Foulds 距离概括为一组称为 Bourque 距离的距离度量，用于比较变异树。我们展示了可以在线性时间内计算变异树的 Bourque 距离的基本版本。我们还在 Robinson-Foulds 距离和最近邻交换距离之间建立了联系。