Authors

Abstract. We consider the problem of reconstructing near-perfect phy-logenetic trees using binary character states (referred to as BNPP). A perfect phylogeny assumes that every character mutates at most once in the evolutionary tree, yielding an algorithm for binary character states that is computationally efficient but not robust to imperfections in real data. A near-perfect phylogeny relaxes the perfect phylogeny assumption by allowing at most a constant number q of additional mutations. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for constructing optimal phylogenies and provide empirical evidence of its performance. The algorithm runs in time O((72κ)qnm+ nm2) where n is the number of taxa, m is the number of characters and κ is the number of characters that share four gametes with some other character. This is fixed parameter tractable when q and κ are constants and significantly improves on the previous asymptotic bounds by reducing the exponent to q. Furthermore, the complexity of the pre-vious work makes it impractical and in fact no known implementation o