• An arborescence is a directed rooted tree, i.e. a directed acyclic graph in which there exists a single source node that has a unique path to every other node. Every arborescence is a polytree, but not every polytree is an arborescence.
• A multitree is a directed acyclic graph in which the subgraph reachable from any node forms a tree. Every polytree is a multitree.
• The reachability relationship among the nodes of a polytree forms a partial order that has order dimension at most three. If the order dimension is three, there must exist a subset of seven elements ${\displaystyle x}$ , ${\displaystyle y_{i}}$ , and ${\displaystyle z_{i}}$  (for ${\displaystyle i=0,1,2}$ ) such that, for each ${\displaystyle i}$ , either ${\displaystyle x\leq y_{i}\geq z_{i}}$  or ${\displaystyle x\geq y_{i}\leq z_{i}}$ , with these six inequalities defining the polytree structure on these seven elements.^[6]
• A fence or zigzag poset is a special case of a polytree in which the underlying tree is a path and the edges have orientations that alternate along the path. The reachability ordering in a polytree has also been called a generalized fence.^[7]

The number of distinct polytrees on ${\displaystyle n}$  unlabeled nodes, for ${\displaystyle n=1,2,3,\dots }$ , is

Sumner's conjecture, named after David Sumner, states that tournaments are universal graphs for polytrees, in the sense that every tournament with ${\displaystyle 2n-2}$  vertices contains every polytree with ${\displaystyle n}$  vertices as a subgraph. Although it remains unsolved, it has been proven for all sufficiently large values of ${\displaystyle n}$ .^[8]

Polytrees have been used as a graphical model for probabilistic reasoning.^[1] If a Bayesian network has the structure of a polytree, then belief propagation may be used to perform inference efficiently on it.^[4][5]

The contour tree of a real-valued function on a vector space is a polytree that describes the level sets of the function. The nodes of the contour tree are the level sets that pass through a critical point of the function and the edges describe contiguous sets of level sets without a critical point. The orientation of an edge is determined by the comparison between the function values on the corresponding two level sets.^[9]

• Glossary of graph theory

• Carr, Hamish; Snoeyink, Jack; Axen, Ulrike (2000), "Computing contour trees in all dimensions", Proc. 11th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2000), Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 918–926, ISBN 978-0-89871-453-1
• Dasgupta, Sanjoy (1999), "Learning polytrees" (PDF), Proc. 15th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 1999), Stockholm, Sweden, July-August 1999, pp. 134–141.
• Deo, Narsingh (1974), Graph Theory with Applications to Engineering and Computer Science (PDF), Englewood, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-363473-6.
• Harary, Frank; Sumner, David (1980), "The dichromatic number of an oriented tree", Journal of Combinatorics, Information & System Sciences, 5 (3): 184–187, MR 0603363.
• Kim, Jin H.; Pearl, Judea (1983), "A computational model for causal and diagnostic reasoning in inference engines" (PDF), Proc. 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1983), Karlsruhe, Germany, August 1983, pp. 190–193.
• Kühn, Daniela; Mycroft, Richard; Osthus, Deryk (2011), "A proof of Sumner's universal tournament conjecture for large tournaments", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Third Series, 102 (4): 731–766, arXiv:1010.4430, doi:10.1112/plms/pdq035, MR 2793448.
• Rebane, George; Pearl, Judea (1987), "The recovery of causal poly-trees from statistical data" (PDF), Proc. 3rd Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 1987), Seattle, WA, USA, July 1987, pp. 222–228.
• Ruskey, Frank (1989), "Transposition generation of alternating permutations", Order, 6 (3): 227–233, doi:10.1007/BF00563523, MR 1048093.
• Simion, Rodica (1991), "Trees with 1-factors and oriented trees", Discrete Mathematics, 88 (1): 93–104, doi:10.1016/0012-365X(91)90061-6, MR 1099270.
• Trotter, William T. Jr.; Moore, John I. Jr. (1977), "The dimension of planar posets", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 22 (1): 54–67, doi:10.1016/0095-8956(77)90048-X.