Pruning rogue taxa improves phylogenetic accuracy: an efficient algorithm and webservice

Syst Biol. 2013 Jan 1;62(1):162-6. doi: 10.1093/sysbio/sys078. Epub 2012 Sep 6.

Abstract

The presence of rogue taxa (rogues) in a set of trees can frequently have a negative impact on the results of a bootstrap analysis (e.g., the overall support in consensus trees). We introduce an efficient graph-based algorithm for rogue taxon identification as well as an interactive webservice implementing this algorithm. Compared with our previous method, the new algorithm is up to 4 orders of magnitude faster, while returning qualitatively identical results. Because of this significant improvement in scalability, the new algorithm can now identify substantially more complex and compute-intensive rogue taxon constellations. On a large and diverse collection of real-world data sets, we show that our method yields better supported reduced/pruned consensus trees than any competing rogue taxon identification method. Using the parallel version of our open-source code, we successfully identified rogue taxa in a set of 100 trees with 116 334 taxa each. For simulated data sets, we show that when removing/pruning rogue taxa with our method from a tree set, we consistently obtain bootstrap consensus trees as well as maximum-likelihood trees that are topologically closer to the respective true trees.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Classification / methods*
  • Computer Simulation
  • Internet*
  • Phylogeny*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software*