Not seeing the forest for the trees: size of the minimum spanning trees (MSTs) forest and branch significance in MST-based phylogenetic analysis.

ABSTRACT: Trees, including minimum spanning trees (MSTs), are commonly used in phylogenetic studies. But, for the research community, it may be unclear that the presented tree is just a hypothesis, chosen from among many possible alternatives. In this scenario, it is important to quantify our confidence in both the trees and the branches/edges included in such trees. In this paper, we address this problem for MSTs by introducing a new edge betweenness metric for undirected and weighted graphs. This spanning edge betweenness metric is defined as the fraction of equivalent MSTs where a given edge is present. The metric provides a per edge statistic that is similar to that of the bootstrap approach frequently used in phylogenetics to support the grouping of taxa. We provide methods for the exact comput

SUBMITTER: Teixeira AS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4370493 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature