Neighbour joining builds phylogenetic trees from distance matrices. It is mainly used in bioinformatics for inference of evolutional relationships between species and prediction of common ancestors. Despite its usefulness in various applications it is rarely available in data mining programs. For this reason we implemented neighbour joining as a widget in general-purpose data mining suite Orange. We also developed several methods for visualisation of the inferred phylogenetic trees. Using our implementation on several use cases we have demonstrated that neighbour joining and constructed clustering trees are useful in data mining tasks outside the scope of bioinformatics.
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