Tree edit distance and common subtrees

Abstract

The relationship between tree edit distance and maximum common subtrees is established, showing that a tree edit distance constrained by insertion and deletions on leaves only and by a simple condition on the cost of the tree edit operations, corresponds to a maximum commonsubtree isomorphism, allowing thus the use of known tree edit distance algorithms to solve the maximum common subtree problem, and viceversa. Further, a tree distance based on the size of a maximum common subtree is introduced.