Ultrametricity indices for the Euclidean and Boolean hypercubes

Abstract

Motivated by Murtagh’s experimental observation that sparse random samples of the hypercube become more and more ultrametric as the dimension increases, we consider a strict version of his ultrametricity coefficient, an index derived from Rammal’s degree of ultrametricity, and a topological ultrametricity index. First, we prove that the three ultrametricity indices converge in probability to one as dimension increases, if the sample size remains fixed. This is done for uniformly and normally distributed samples in the Euclidean hypercube, and for uniformly distributed samples in F₂^N with Hamming distance, as well as for very general probability distributions. Further, this holds true for random categorial data in complete disjunctive form. A second result is that the ultrametricity indices vanish in the limit for the full hypercube F₂^N as dimensionN increases,whereby Murtagh’s ultrametricity index is largest, and the topological ultrametricity index smallest, if N is large.