CharacterInformation()
calculates the cladistic information content
(Steel and Penny 2006)
of a given character, in bits.
The total information in all characters gives a measure of the potential
utility of a dataset (Cotton and Wilkinson 2008)
, which can be
compared with a profile parsimony score (Faith and Trueman 2001)
to
evaluate the degree of homoplasy within a dataset.
CharacterInformation(tokens)
Character vector specifying the tokens assigned to each taxon for
a character. Example: c(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, "?", "-")
.
Note that ambiguous tokens such as (01)
are not supported, and should be
replaced with ?
.
CharacterInformation()
returns a numeric specifying the
phylogenetic information content of the character (sensu
Steel and Penny 2006 ), in bits.
Cotton JA, Wilkinson M (2008).
“Quantifying the potential utility of phylogenetic characters.”
Taxon, 57(1), 131--136.
Faith DP, Trueman JWH (2001).
“Towards an inclusive philosophy for phylogenetic inference.”
Systematic Biology, 50(3), 331--350.
doi:10.1080/10635150118627
.
Steel MA, Penny D (2006).
“Maximum parsimony and the phylogenetic information in multistate characters.”
In Albert VA (ed.), Parsimony, Phylogeny, and Genomics, 163--178.
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Other split information functions:
SplitInformation()
,
SplitMatchProbability()
,
TreesMatchingSplit()
,
UnrootedTreesMatchingSplit()