Speeding Up Neighbour-Joining Tree Construction

Gerth Stølting Brodal, Rolf Fagerberg, Thomas Mailund, Christian Nørgaard Storm Pedersen, Derek Phillips

    Research output: Book/anthology/dissertation/reportReportResearch

    Abstract

    A widely used method for constructing phylogenetic trees is the neighbour-joining method of Saitou and Nei. We develope heuristics for speeding up the neighbour-joining method which generate the same phylogenetic trees as the original method. All heuristics are based on using a quad-tree to guide the search for the next pair of nodes to join, but di#er in the information stored in quad-tree nodes, the way the search is performed, and in the way the quad-tree is updated after a join. We empirically evaluate the performance of the heuristics on distance matrices obtained from the Pfam collection of alignments, and compare the running time with that of the QuickTree tool, a well-known and widely used implementation of the standard neighbour-joining method. The results show that the presented heuristics can give a significant speed-up over the standard neighbour-joining method, already for medium sized instances.

    Original languageEnglish
    Place of publicationwww.brics.dk
    PublisherALCOM-FT
    VolumeALCOMFT-TR-03-102
    EditionWork package 5
    Number of pages9
    Publication statusPublished - 2003

    Keywords

    • Algorithms
    • Experimentation
    • Performance
    • Neighbour-joining
    • tree construction

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