Information Theoretic Phylogenetics

This is a working directory for the Summer 2021 information theoretic phylogenetics project in Dr. Cummings' Lab at UMD. We worked on essentially two information-theoretic algorithms for phylogeny reconstruction from aligned sequence data--the information gain-based divisive algorithm and the variation of information-based agglomerative algorithm. We also developed variants of the two by tweaking branch lengths and using neighbour joining for the agglomerative case.

• Go here to know more about the divisive algorithm of generating trees from aligned DNA sequences.

• Go here to know more about the variation-of-information based algorithm of agglomerative clustering of DNA sequences.

Performance and Computation

• Go here to check out how these algorithms perform on some sample datasets.

• Go here to find out more about the computational aspects of using our algorithm on randomly generated sequence alignment data.