Cladistic hypotheses as degree of equivalence relational structures: implications for three-itemstatements

Three-item statements, as minimal informative rooted binary phylogenetic trees on three items, are the minimal units of cladistic information. Their importance for phylogenetic reconstruction, consensus and supertree methods relies on both (i) the fact that any cladistic tree can always be decomposed into a set of three-item statements, and (ii) the possibility, at least under some conditions, to build a new cladistic tree by combining all or part of the three-item statements deduced from several prior cladistic trees. In order to formalise such procedures, several k-adic rules of inference, i.e., rules that allow us to deduce at least one new three-item statement from exactly k other ones, have been identified. However, no axiomatic background has been proposed, and it remains unknown if a particular k-adic rule of inference can be reduced to more basic rules. In order to solve this problem, we propose here to define three-item statements in terms of degree of equivalence relations. Given both the axiomatic definition of the latter and their strong connection to hierarchical classifications, we establish a list of the most basic properties for three-item statements. With such an approach, we show that it is possible to combine five three-item statements from basic rules although they are not combinable only from dyadic rules. Such a result suggests that all higher k-adic rules are well reducible to a finite set of simpler rules.