Display-based approaches for Phylogenetic tree visualisation

摘要

This paper is about visualising tree structured data. In particular, the emphasis is on visualising the similarities and differences between pairs of trees. There are many research areas (such as biology, linguistics, chemistry and computer science) that use the tree as a basic data structure. The impetus for the work comes from the field of bioinformatics, where biologists construct complex phylogenetic trees to represent the evolution of species or genes. When dealing with these sorts of data, biologists often have to deal with multiple trees generated from the same set of data. The biologists have to compare these trees in order to get a better understanding of these data. This paper aims to explore techniques to visualise the differences between two phylogenetic trees. Specifically, an application has been developed, named VCPT (Visual Comparison of Phylogenetic Trees) that implements for a new algorithm and display-based approaches that will help in visualising the similarity and differences between the phylogenetic trees.