Molecular evolutionary phylogenetic trees based on minimum description length principle

Ever since the discovery of a molecular clock, many methods have been developed to reconstruct the molecular evolutionary phylogenetic trees. In this paper, we deal with this problem from the viewpoint of an inductive inference and apply Rissanen’s minimum description length principle to extract the minimum complexsty phylogenetic tree. OUT method describes the complexity of molecular phylogenetic tree by three terms which are related to the tree topology, the sum of branch len,gths and the difference between the model and th.e data measured by logarithmic likelihood. Five mitochondrial DNA sequences from human, common chimpanzee, pygmy chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan are used for investigating the validity of this method. It is suggested that th,is method is superior to the traditional meth,od in that it still show the good accuracy even near the root of phytogenetic trees.