Phylogenetic trees are the fundamental mathematical representation of
evolutionary processes in biology. As data objects, they are characterized by
the challenges associated with "big data," as well as the complication that
their discrete geometric structure results in a non-Euclidean phylogenetic tree
space, which poses computational and statistical limitations. We propose and
study a novel framework to study sets of phylogenetic trees based on tropical
geometry. In particular, we focus on characterizing our framework for
statistical analyses of evolutionary biological processes represented by
phylogenetic trees. Our setting exhibits analytic, geometric, and topological
properties that are desirable for theoretical studies in probability and
statistics, as well as increased computational efficiency over the current
state-of-the-art. We demonstrate our approach on seasonal influenza data.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl