Invariant based quartet puzzling
First proposed by Cavender and Felsenstein, and Lake, invariant based algorithms for phylogenetic reconstruction were widely dismissed by practicing biologists because invariants were perceived to have limited accuracy in constructing trees based on DNA sequences of reasonable length. Recent developments by algebraic geometers have led to the construction of lists of invariants which have been demonstrated to be more accurate on small sequences, but were limited in that they could only be used for trees with small numbers of taxa. We have developed and tested an invariant based quartet puzzling algorithm which is accurate and efficient for biologically reasonable data sets.
invariants quartet puzzling phylogenetic reconstruction