Evolutionary Indeces for Classifying Modes of Tumour Evolution

Trees are a useful mathematical tool in evolutionary theory, especially when describing the structure of an evolving population. In mathematical oncology, clonal trees can be used to construct the evolutionary history of a tumour, and tree balance and diversity indices further classify it within an oncoevotype.While obtaining diversity and balance indices for a specific tree is straightforward, going in reverse is not a trivial matter. One of our main goals is classifying clonal trees based on a minimal set of indices. To this end, we explore properties of new and existing balance and diversity indices, along with their mutual dependencies. This should lay the groundwork for further investigation of the possibility of defining an index metric, which would mark a step towards an analytic formulation of mathematical oncology.