Revisiting an Equivalence Between Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood Methods in Phylogenetics

Revisiting an equivalence between maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood methods in phylogenetics.

Tuffley and Steel (Bull. Math. Biol. 59:581-607, 1997) proved that maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony methods in phylogenetics are equivalent for sequences of characters under a simple symmetric model of substitution with no common mechanism. This result has been widely cited ever since. We show that small changes to the model assumptions suffice to make the two methods inequivalent. In p...

Maximum Likelihood Methods in Molecular Phylogenetics

Fundamental differences between the methods of maximum likelihood and maximum posterior probability in phylogenetics.

Using a four-taxon example under a simple model of evolution, we show that the methods of maximum likelihood and maximum posterior probability (which is a Bayesian method of inference) may not arrive at the same optimal tree topology. Some patterns that are separately uninformative under the maximum likelihood method are separately informative under the Bayesian method. We also show that this d...

Parsimony accelerated Maximum Likelihood searches

Phylogenetic search is a key tool used in a variety of biological research endeavours. However, this search problem is known to be computationally difficult, due to the astronomically large search space, making the use of heuristic methods necessary. The performance of heuristic methods for finding Maximum Likelihood (ML) trees can be improved by using parsimony as an initial estimator for ML. ...

MEGA5: molecular evolutionary genetics analysis using maximum likelihood, evolutionary distance, and maximum parsimony methods.

Comparative analysis of molecular sequence data is essential for reconstructing the evolutionary histories of species and inferring the nature and extent of selective forces shaping the evolution of genes and species. Here, we announce the release of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis version 5 (MEGA5), which is a user-friendly software for mining online databases, building sequence align...