Generalizing Fourier Calculus on Evolutionary Trees to Splits Networks

Biologists have been interested in Phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms, for more than 140 years. In spite of this, it has only been in the last 40 years that advances in technology and the availability of DNA sequences have led to statistical, computational and algorithmic work on determining evolutionary relatedness between organisms. One method of determining historical relationships between organisms is to assume a group based evolutionary model and use a discrete Fourier transform. The 1993 paper "Fourier Calculus on Evolutionary Trees" by L.A. Szekely, M.A. Steel and P.L. Erdos outlines this process. The transform presented in Szekely et al provides an invertible relationship between phylogenetic trees and expected frequencies of nucleotide patterns in nucleotide sequences. This implies that given a set of nucleotide sequences from various organisms it is possible to construct a phylogenetic tree that represents the historical relationships of those organisms. Some scenarios are poorly described by phylogenetic trees and there are biological and statistical reasons for using networks to model phylogenetic relationships. Given this motivation I have generalized Szekely et al's result to apply to a specific type of phylogenetic network known as a splits network.