MBE Advance Access originally published online on August 16, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(10):2277-2285; doi:10.1093/molbev/msm160
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Research Articles |
Statistics of the Log-Det Estimator
European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK
E-mail: tim.massingham{at}ebi.ac.uk.
Accepted for publication July 21, 2007.
The log-det estimator is a measure of divergence (evolutionary distance) between sequences of biological characters, DNA or amino acids, for example, and has been shown to be robust to biases in composition that can cause problems for other estimators. We provide a statistical framework to construct high-accuracy confidence intervals for log-det estimates and compare the efficiency of the estimator to that of maximum likelihood using time-reversible Markov models. The log-det estimator is found to have good statistical properties under such general models.
Key Words: log-det distance pairwise distances statistical properties
Peter Lockhart, Associate Editor