Character information content

CharacterInformation() calculates the cladistic information content Steel2006TreeTools of a given character, in bits. The total information in all characters gives a measure of the potential utility of a dataset Cotton2008TreeTools, which can be compared with a profile parsimony score Faith2001TreeTools to evaluate the degree of homoplasy within a dataset.

Usage

CharacterInformation(tokens)

Arguments

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 ?.

Value

CharacterInformation() returns a numeric specifying the phylogenetic information content of the character (sensu Steel2006;nobracketsTreeTools), in bits.

References

See also

Other split information functions: SplitInformation(), SplitMatchProbability(), TreesMatchingSplit(), UnrootedTreesMatchingSplit()

Author

Martin R. Smith (martin.smith@durham.ac.uk)