Jackknife and Bootstrap Tests of the Composition Vector Trees

Zuo, Guanghong; Xu, Zhao; Yu, Hongjie; Hao, Bailin

However, traditionally phylogenetic trees obtained using various methods are subject to statistical re-sampling tests such as bootstrap or jackknife (10) . In fact, due to the limited size of sampling space, most researchers could not afford to do jackknife tests and had to be content with bootstrap type tests. Nonetheless, even successful passing of these tests merely shows stability and self-consistency of the inferred trees with respect to certain variations in the original dataset. Objective judgment of the meaningfulness of trees must rely on arguments beyond trees themselves, say, by direct comparison with the efforts of many generations of taxonomists as ideally phylogeny and taxonomy should agree with each other.