Paper detail

On symmetries in phylogenetic trees

Billey et al. [arXiv:1507.04976] have recently discovered a surprisingly simple formula for the number $a_n(σ)$ of leaf-labelled rooted non-embedded binary trees (also known as phylogenetic trees) with $n\geq 1$ leaves, fixed (for the relabelling action) by a given permutation $σ\in\frak{S}_n$. Denoting by $λ\vdash n$ the integer partition giving the sizes of the cycles of $σ$ in non-increasing order, they show by a guessing/checking approach that if $λ$ is a binary partition (it is known that $a_n(σ)=0$ otherwise), then $$ a_n(σ)=\prod_{i=2}^{\ell(λ)}(2(λ_i+\cdots+λ_{\ell(λ)})-1), $$ and they derive from it a formula and random generation procedure for tanglegrams (and more generally for tangled chains). Our main result is a combinatorial proof of the formula, which yields a simplification of the random sampler for tangled chains.