The k-assignment Polytope and the Space of Evolutionary Trees

Abstract: This thesis consists of two papers.The first paper is a study of the structure of the k-assignment polytope, whose vertices are the m x n (0; 1)-matrices with exactly k 1:s and at most one 1 in each row and each column. This is a natural generalisation of the Birkhoff polytope and many of the known properties of the Birkhoff polytope are generalised. Two equivalent representations of the faces are given, one as (0; 1)-matrices and one as ear decompositions of bipartite graphs. These tools are used to describe properties of the polytope, especially a complete description of the cover relation in the face lattice of the polytope and an exact expression for the diameter.The second paper studies the edge-product space ?(X) for trees on X. This space is generated by the set of edge-weighted finite trees on X, and arises by multiplying the weights of edges on paths in trees. These spaces are closely connected to tree-indexed Markov processes in molecular evolutionary biology. It is known that ?(X) has a natural CW-complex structure, and a combinatorial description of the associated face poset exists which is a poset S(X) of X-forests. In this paper it is shown that the edge-product space is a regular cell complex. One important part in showing that is to conclude that all intervals [Ô, ?], ? ? S(X), have recursive coatom orderings.