MBE Advance Access originally published online on December 29, 2004
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2005 22(4):905-913; doi:10.1093/molbev/msi074
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Research Article |
Listening to Viral Tongues: Comparing Viral Trees Using a Stochastic Context-Free Grammar

* Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia Genome Center, and Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Columbia University, New York; and
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine
E-mail: wfitch{at}uci.edu.
We suggest a probabilistic method for comparing the topological features of large phylogenetic trees. Using this method, we demonstrate that a stochastic grammar can generate three influenza-subtype (A H1, A H3, and B) hemagglutinin trees used in an earlier study, with statistically similar parameters. The proposed methodology is applicable to a broad class of problems that require comparison of the topological properties of various dendrograms.
Key Words: stochastic context-free grammar human influenza virus hemagglutinin stochastic measures of tree similarity multitype branching processes