Analysis on the reconstruction accuracy of the Fitch method for inferring ancestral states

Background: As one of the most widely used parsimony methods for ancestral reconstruction, the Fitch method minimizes the total number of hypothetical substitutions along all branches of a tree to explain the evolution of a character. Due to the extensive usage of this method, it has become a scientific endeavor in recent years to study the reconstruction accuracies of the Fitch method. However, most studies are restricted to 2-state evolutionary models and a study for higher-state models is needed since DNA sequences take the format of 4-state series and protein sequences even have 20 states. Results: In this paper, the ambiguous and unambiguous reconstruction accuracy of the Fitch method are studied for N-state evolutionary models. Given an arbitrary phylogenetic tree, a recurrence system is first presented to calculate iteratively the two accuracies. As complete binary tree and comb-shaped tree are the two extremal evolutionary tree topologies according to balance, we focus on the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jialiang Yang, Jun Li, Liuhuan Dong, Stefan Grünewald
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, BMCBI 2011, Complete Binary Trees, Reconstruction Accuracies, Tree