A Fitness Distance Correlation Measure for Evolutionary Trees

Phylogenetics is concerned with inferring the genealogical relationships between a group of organisms (or taxa), and this relationship is usually expressed as an evolutionary tree. However, inferring the phylogenetic tree is not a trivial task since it is impossible to know the true evolutionary history for a set of organisms. As a result, most phylogenetic analyses rely on effective heuristics for obtaining accurate trees. These heuristics use tree score as a basis for establishing an accurate depiction of evolutionary tree relationships. Relatively little work has been done to analyze the relationship between improving tree scores (fitness) and topological accuracy (distance). In this paper, we present a new fitness-distance correlation coefficient called rF D to quantify the relationship between evolutionary trees. By applying this measure to three biological datasets consisting of 44, 60, and 174 taxa, our results show that improvements in fitness are strongly correlated (rF D ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: BICOB
• Authors: Hyun Jung Park, Tiffani L. Williams
• Keywords: BICOB 2009, Computational Biology, Evolutionary Trees, Phylogenetic, Tree Scores