Minimum description principle applied to construction of molecular phylogenetic tree.

Ever since the discovery of a molecular clock (constancy of molecular evolutionary rate), many methods have been developed to estimate the molecular evolutionary phylogenetic trees from the homologous nucleic sequences of different species. In this paper, we deal with this problem from the view point of an inductive inference, and apply Rissanen's minimum description length principle to extract the minimum complexity phylogenetic tree. Five mitochondrial DNA sequences from human, common chimpanzee, pygmy chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan are used for investigating the validity of this method. It is found that this method is superior to the traditional method in that it still shows a high degree of accuracy, even near the root of phylogenetic trees.