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BRANCH SUPPORT AND TREE STABILITY
Author(s) -
Bremer Ka˚re
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
cladistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.323
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 1096-0031
pISSN - 0748-3007
DOI - 10.1111/j.1096-0031.1994.tb00179.x
Subject(s) - weighting , mathematics , tree (set theory) , prime (order theory) , stability (learning theory) , index (typography) , combinatorics , algorithm , computer science , machine learning , physics , world wide web , acoustics
— Branch support is quantified as the extra length needed to lose a branch in the consensus of near‐most‐parsimonious trees. This approach is based solely on the original data, as opposed to the data perturbation used in the bootstrap procedure. If trees have been generated by Farris's successive approximations approach to character weighting, branch support should be examined in terms of weighted extra length needed to lose a branch. The sum of all branch support values over the tree divided by the length of the most parsimonious tree[s] provides a new index, the total support index. This index is a measure of tree stability in terms of supported resolutions, which is of prime importance in cladistic analysis.