Accurate Phylogenetic Tree Reconstruction from Quartets: A Heuristic Approach

Abstract

Supertree methods construct trees on a set of taxa (species) combining many smaller trees on the overlapping subsets of the entire set of taxa. A 'quartet' is an unrooted tree over 4 taxa, hence the quartet-based supertree methods combine many 4-taxon unrooted trees into a single and coherent tree over the complete set of taxa. Quartet-based phylogeny reconstruction methods have been receiving considerable attentions in the recent years. An accurate and efficient quartet-based method might be competitive with the current best phylogenetic tree reconstruction methods (such as maximum likelihood or Bayesian MCMC analyses), without being as computationally intensive. In this paper, we present a novel and highly accurate quartet-based phylogenetic tree reconstruction method. We performed an extensive experimental study to evaluate the accuracy and scalability of our approach on both simulated and biological datasets.