A major computational problem in biology is the reconstruction of evolutionary trees for species sets, and accuracy is measured by comparing the topologies of the reconstructed tree and the model tree. Using both analytical and experimental techniques, one can show that on large trees, the two most popular methods in systematic biology, Neighbor-Joining and Maximum Parsimony heuristics, as well as two promising methods introduced by theoretical computer scientists, are all likely to have significant errors in the topology reconstruction of the model tree. Hybrid Tree Construction Methods. Preprint , Abstract . Software A program implementing the hybrid method is very simple to write.
Input is a list of trees.
The program processes one tree at a time. Throughout, it maintains a list S of compatible splits. After reading a new tree from the list, the splits of the tree are computed. You will need to install LEDA to be able to compile the software.