For a given set of

taxa In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; : taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and ...

, and a set of splits S on the taxa, usually together with a non-negative weighting, which may represent character changes distance, or may also have a more abstract interpretation, if the set of splits S is compatible, then it can be represented by an unrooted

phylogenetic tree A phylogenetic tree or phylogeny is a graphical representation which shows the evolutionary history between a set of species or taxa during a specific time.Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA. In ...

and each edge in the tree corresponds to exactly one of the splits. More generally, S can always be represented by a split network, which is an unrooted

phylogenetic network A phylogenetic network is any graph used to visualize evolutionary relationships (either abstractly or explicitly) between nucleotide sequences, genes, chromosomes, genomes, or species. They are employed when reticulation events such as hybridi ...

with the property that every split in S is represented by an array of parallel edges in the network.

References

Further reading