A sub-cubic time algorithm for computing the quartet distance between two general trees
2011
A Fast Algorithm for Computing Quartet Distance Between Trees
publication
Evidence: high
Author Information
Author(s): Jesper Nielsen, Anders K. Kristensen, Thomas Mailund, Christian N. S. Pedersen
Primary Institution: Bioinformatics Research Centre (BiRC), Aarhus University
Hypothesis
Can we develop a faster algorithm for computing the quartet distance between general trees?
Conclusion
The new algorithm is significantly faster than previous methods for computing quartet distance.
Supporting Evidence
- The algorithm runs in close to quadratic time in practice.
- It is the fastest algorithm for computing quartet distance independent of the degree of inner nodes.
- The implementation was tested on trees with up to 15,000 leaves.
Takeaway
The researchers created a new way to measure how different two trees are, and it's much quicker than older methods.
Methodology
The algorithm computes the quartet distance using a sub-cubic time complexity approach.
Limitations
The performance may vary depending on the topology of the trees being compared.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
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