COSPEDTree-II: Improved couplet based phylogenetic supertree
Phylogenetic supertrees synthesize a set of phylogenetic trees carrying overlapping taxa set, preferably with the consensus topologies of individual taxa subsets. Supertree construction is an NP-hard problem, and the methods based on decomposition and synthesis of fixed size subtree topologies (such as triplets or quartets) are the most popular. Time and space complexities of these methods, however, depend on the subtree size considered. Our earlier work proposed a couplet (taxa pair) based supertree method COSPEDTree, which produces slightly conservative (not fully resolved) supertrees. Here we propose its improved version COSPEDTree-II, which produces better resolved supertrees with lower number of missing branches, and incurs much lower running time.