Classes of phylogenetic networks that are robust to root placement

Standard phylogenetic reconstruction techniques often yield unrooted phylogenetic networks; these are subsequently rooted to infer evolutionary history.

A common problem in this process is to determine the structural classes to which the resulting network will belong.

In this paper, we investigate unrooted networks in which the choice of any root results in a valid rooted phylogenetic network, a property we define as {\em robustly orientable}.

We then establish a strict structural condition for this class, specifically, that an unrooted network is robustly orientable if and only if it contains no sink components.

We also show that if an unrooted network is level-$2$ or less, or if it is tree-based, then it is robustly orientable.

Furthermore, we define an unrooted network to be {\em robustly class $\mathcal C$} if the choice of any root results in a network belonging to class $\mathcal C$.

We demonstrate that an unrooted network is robustly tree-child or robustly stack-free if and only if it is level-$1$ or less.

Finally, we show that a phylogenetic network is robustly normal if and only if it is a phylogenetic tree.