In reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from molecular data, it has been pointed out that multifurcate phylogenetic trees are difficult to be correctly reconstructed by the conventional methods like maximum likelihood method (ML). In these years, we have been engaged in developing a new method based on the minimum complexity principle widely used in the inductive inference, which we call minimum model-based complexity (MBC) method. This method has been proved to be efficient in estimating multifurcate rooted tree so far, but in the case of unrooted tree, it appeared to be biased to multifurcate topology. In this study, we make further investigations about MBC method in estimating the multifurcate unrooted tree by using computer simulation and statistical test approach. The results show that, if we take into account the model misspecification effects, the MBC method provides good estimations also in the case of multifurcate unrooted tree and suggest that it could be generally used for reconstructing molecular phylogenetic tree with multifurcation.
展开▼
