Fast and Accurate Phylogeny Reconstruction Algorithms Based on the Minimum-Evolution Principle

The Minimum Evolution (ME) approach to phylogeny estimation has been shown to be statistically consistent when it is used in conjunction with ordinary least-squares (OLS) fitting of a metric to a tree structure. The traditional approach to using ME has been to start with the Neighbor Joining (NJ) topology for a given matrix and then do a topological search from that starting point. The first stage requires O(n³) time, where n is the number of taxa, while the current implementations of the second are in O(p n³) or more, where p is the number of swaps performed by the program. In this paper, we examine a greedy approach to minimum evolution which produces a starting topology in O(n²) time. Moreover, we provide an algorithm that searches for the best topology using nearest neighbor interchanges (NNIs), where the cost of doing p NNIs is O(n² C p n), i.e., O(n²) in practice because p is always much smaller than n. The Greedy Minimum Evolution (GME) algorithm, when used in combination with NNIs, produces trees which are fairly close to NJ trees in terms of topological accuracy. We also examine ME under a balanced weighting scheme, where sibling subtrees have equal weight, as opposed to the standard “unweighted ” OLS, wher