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Strongest Evidence Revisited
Author(s) -
Salisbury Benjamin A.
Publication year - 2000
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.1096-0031.2000.tb00358.x
Subject(s) - phylogenetic tree , cladistics , occam's razor , set (abstract data type) , tree (set theory) , statistics , mathematics , maximum parsimony , null hypothesis , biology , data set , fixation (population genetics) , evolutionary biology , algorithm , computer science , combinatorics , clade , genetics , gene , programming language
In response to comments by J. S. Farris (2000, Cladistics 16, 403–410) on the strongest evidence (SE) approach to phylogenetic analysis, I examine the concepts on which it is founded and reevaluate its merits. SE's null model of signal absence in characters is not treated as background knowledge, but as a reference point for evaluating a data set's phylogenetic signal in a tree‐specific manner. In simulation tests, the SE methods perform reasonably well; although parsimony is generally more accurate and less biased than SE, SE is distinctly more accurate in some circumstances. Simulations further indicate that jackknifing is often beneficial in both SE and parsimony analyses. Iterative fixation of splits shows promise as an auxiliary procedure for SE and other methods that weight according to apparent homoplasy.