Two C plus plus libraries for counting trees on a phylogenetic terrace

摘要

Motivation: The presence of terraces in phylogenetic tree space, i. e. a potentially large number of distinct tree topologies that have exactly the same analytical likelihood score, was first described by Sanderson et al. However, popular software tools for maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic inference do not yet routinely report, if inferred phylogenies reside on a terrace, or not. We believe, this is due to the lack of an efficient library to (i) determine if a tree resides on a terrace, (ii) calculate how many trees reside on a terrace and (iii) enumerate all trees on a terrace.