@article{SisLab2955,
          volume = {18},
           month = {February},
           title = {MPBoot: fast phylogenetic maximum parsimony tree inference and bootstrap approximation},
          author = {Thi Diep Hoang and Sy Vinh Le and Tomas Flouri and Alexandros Stamatakis and Arndt von Haeseler and Quang Minh Bui},
            year = {2018},
             doi = {https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1131-3},
         journal = {BMC Evolutionary Biology},
             url = {https://eprints.uet.vnu.edu.vn/eprints/id/eprint/2955/},
        abstract = {BACKGROUND:
The nonparametric bootstrap is widely used to measure the branch support of phylogenetic trees. However, bootstrapping is computationally expensive and remains a bottleneck in phylogenetic analyses. Recently, an ultrafast bootstrap approximation (UFBoot) approach was proposed for maximum likelihood analyses. However, such an approach is still missing for maximum parsimony.

RESULTS:
To close this gap we present MPBoot, an adaptation and extension of UFBoot to compute branch supports under the maximum parsimony principle. MPBoot works for both uniform and non-uniform cost matrices. Our analyses on biological DNA and protein showed that under uniform cost matrices, MPBoot runs on average 4.7 (DNA) to 7 times (protein data) (range: 1.2-20.7) faster than the standard parsimony bootstrap implemented in PAUP*; but 1.6 (DNA) to 4.1 times (protein data) slower than the standard bootstrap with a fast search routine in TNT (fast-TNT). However, for non-uniform cost matrices MPBoot is 5 (DNA) to 13 times (protein data) (range:0.3-63.9) faster than fast-TNT. We note that MPBoot achieves better scores more frequently than PAUP* and fast-TNT. However, this effect is less pronounced if an intensive but slower search in TNT is invoked. Moreover, experiments on large-scale simulated data show that while both PAUP* and TNT bootstrap estimates are too conservative, MPBoot bootstrap estimates appear more unbiased.

CONCLUSIONS:
MPBoot provides an efficient alternative to the standard maximum parsimony bootstrap procedure. It shows favorable performance in terms of run time, the capability of finding a maximum parsimony tree, and high bootstrap accuracy on simulated as well as empirical data sets. MPBoot is easy-to-use, open-source and available at http://www.cibiv.at/software/mpboot .}
}