Systems | Information | Learning | Optimization
 

How much is lost in pairwise correlations: the case of phylogenetics

Among the many popular techniques for reconstructing evolutionary trees from molecular sequences, so-called distance-matrix methods are typically the fastest. This speed stems from a straightforward, intuitive approach: repeated merging of the closest clusters of sequences. However, unlike more elaborate techniques such as maximum likelihood, distance-matrix methods only exploit empirical correlations …