A unimodal probability model for graph-valued random objects has been derived and applied previously to several types of graphs
(cluster trees, digraphs, and classification and regression trees) (For example, Banks and Constantine, 1998; Shannon and Banks, 1999).
Here we apply this model to HMP trees constructed from RDP matches. Let \(G\) be the finite set of taxonomic trees with elements
\(g\), and \(d: G \times G \to R^{+}\) an arbitrary metric of distance on \(G\). We have the probability measure \(H(g^{*},\tau)\) defined by
$$P(g;g^{*},\tau) = c(g^{*},\tau) \exp(-\tau d(g^{*},g) ), for all g \in G,$$
where \(g^{*}\) is the modal or central tree, \(\tau\) is a concentration parameter, and \(c(g^{*},\tau)\) is the normalization constant.
The distance measure between two trees is the Euclidean norm of the difference between their corresponding adjacency-vectors. To estimate the parameters
\((g^{*},\tau)\), we use the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) procedure described in La Rosa et al. (see reference 2)