Computer science and parsimony: a reappraisal, with discussion of methods for poorly structured datasets

In recent years, several publications in computer science journals have proposed new heuristic methods for parsimony analysis. This contribution discusses those papers, including methods highly praised by their authors, such as Hydra, Sampars and GA + PR + LS. Trees of comparable or better scores ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Goloboff, Pablo Augusto
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2015
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/12477
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/12477
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Parsimony
Phylogeny
Cladistics
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.6
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Description
Summary:In recent years, several publications in computer science journals have proposed new heuristic methods for parsimony analysis. This contribution discusses those papers, including methods highly praised by their authors, such as Hydra, Sampars and GA + PR + LS. Trees of comparable or better scores can be obtained using the program TNT, but from one to three orders of magnitude faster. In some cases, the search methods are very similar to others long in use in phylogenetics, but the enormous speed differences seem to correspond more to poor implementations than to actual differences in the methods themselves.