statistical genetics Statistical genetics is a scientific field concerned with the development and application of statistical methods for drawing inferences from genetic data. The term is most commonly used in the context of human genetics. Research in statistical ge ...

, Felsenstein's tree-pruning algorithm (or Felsenstein's tree-peeling algorithm), attributed to

Joseph Felsenstein Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein (born May 9, 1942) is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of ''In ...

, is an

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

for computing the

likelihood The likelihood function (often simply called the likelihood) represents the probability of random variable realizations conditional on particular values of the statistical parameters. Thus, when evaluated on a given sample, the likelihood funct ...

of an

evolutionary tree A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological s ...

from

nucleic acid Nucleic acids are biopolymers, macromolecules, essential to all known forms of life. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomers made of three components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main ...

sequence data. The algorithm is often used as a subroutine in a search for a

maximum likelihood In statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by maximizing a likelihood function so that, under the assumed sta ...

estimate for an evolutionary tree. Further, it can be used in a hypothesis test for whether evolutionary rates are constant (by using

likelihood ratio test In statistics, the likelihood-ratio test assesses the goodness of fit of two competing statistical models based on the ratio of their likelihoods, specifically one found by maximization over the entire parameter space and another found after i ...

s). It can also be used to provide error estimates for the parameters describing an evolutionary tree.

References

{{statistics-stub Statistical genetics