Analysis on Algorithms for Constructing Phylogenetic Trees From Distances

Neighbour-joining algorithm (NJ for short) is an used widely algorithm for constructing phylogenetic trees from distances because of its high accuracy. For NJ costs a lot of time to construct phylogenetic trees for the large input data, it does not often output a result within feasible time. Until now, there are several improved algorithms of NJ aiming for speeding up the construction of trees, but there is no research on the accuracy of those improved algorithms. The paper will analyze and compare the accuracy of NJ as well as its improved algorithms by means of the experiments. We introduce a new improved algorithm, called RandomNJ, which is an efficient method for constructing phylogenetic trees from distances. Furthermore, we design the INJ which is a web-based server for on-line constructing the phylogenetic trees using the improved algorithms and NJ. It is available from http://bioinformatics.imu.edu.cn/INJ/.