Intuitively, however, latent tree models encode low rank dependencies among the observed variables permitting the development of "spec-tral" methods that can lead to provably correct solutions.
we leverage the concept of additive tree metrics (Buneman, 1971;Buneman, 1974) in phylogenetics and machine learning that can create a special distance metric among the observed variables as a function of the underlying spectral dependencies (Choi et al., 2011;Ishteva et al., 2012).