Kendallnotáció

Kendallnotáció is a system for representing phylogenetic trees, which are diagrams that show the evolutionary relationships among a group of organisms. Developed by Joseph Felsenstein in 1986, it is named after the statistician and evolutionary biologist Bruce Kendall. This notation is particularly useful for comparing different phylogenetic trees or for describing the structure of a single tree in a concise and unambiguous way.

The core idea of Kendallnotáció is to represent a tree by breaking it down into a series of splits. A split is essentially a bipartition of the set of taxa (the organisms or groups being studied) into two non-empty subsets. Each split corresponds to a node in the phylogenetic tree where a lineage diverges. The Kendall representation of a tree is the set of all such splits that define the tree's branching pattern.

This notation allows for efficient algorithms for tree manipulation and comparison. For instance, it can be used to calculate the distance between two trees, indicating how different their evolutionary histories are. It is a fundamental tool in the field of phylogenetics, enabling researchers to quantitatively analyze and communicate the results of evolutionary studies. While visually intuitive tree diagrams are common, Kendallnotáció provides a more formal and computational approach to representing and working with phylogenetic information.