Phylogeny

Phylogeny is the study of relationships among different groups of organisms and their evolutionary development.

In 1971, Peter Buneman presented a paper in which he described, amongst other things, a way to construct a tree from a collection of pairwise compatible splits of a finite set. This construction is immediately generalizable to a collection of arbitrary splits, in which case it gives rise to the Buneman graph, a certain connected, median graph representing the given collection of splits in a canonical fashion