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Data from: PartitionFinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analyses.

Cite this dataset

Lanfear, Robert; Calcott, Brett; Ho, Simon Y. W.; Guindon, Stephane (2012). Data from: PartitionFinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analyses. [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fc30r431

Abstract

In phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequence data, partitioning involves estimating independent models of molecular evolution for different sets of sites in a sequence alignment. Choosing an appropriate partitioning scheme is an important step in most analyses because it can affect the accuracy of phylogenetic reconstruction. Despite this, partitioning schemes are often chosen without explicit statistical justification. Here, we describe two new objective methods for the combined selection of best-fit partitioning schemes and nucleotide substitution models. These methods allow millions of partitioning schemes to be compared in realistic timeframes, and so permit the objective selection of partitioning schemes even for large multi-locus DNA datasets. We demonstrate that these methods significantly outperform previous approaches, including the ad hoc selection of partitioning schemes (e.g. partitioning by gene or codon position), and a recently proposed hierarchical clustering method. We have implemented these methods in an open-source program, PartitionFinder. This program allows users to select partitioning schemes and substitution models using a range of information-theoretic metrics (e.g. the BIC, AIC, and AICc). We hope that PartitionFinder will encourage the objective selection of partitioning schemes, and thus lead to improvements in phylogenetic analyses. PartitionFinder is written in Python and runs under Mac OSX 10.4 and above. The program, source code, and a detailed manual are freely available from .

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