Measuring Support for Phylogenies: The “Proportional Support Index”

The total support index (Bremer, 1994), a measure of cladogram support, is influenced both by character incongruence and by uninformative characters. A modified version of this index is therefore proposed—the proportional support index. This index measures the actual support for a cladogram relative to the maximum potential support as determined by the number of informative characters. This index is not distorted by uninformative characters and is thus a more accurate means to compare the strength of phylogenetic signals in different data sets.

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