title: Anchoring quartet-based phylogenetic distances and applications to species tree reconstruction.
abstract: Inferring species trees from gene trees using the coalescent-based summary methods has been the subject of much attention, yet new scalable and accurate methods are needed.
  
  
  
  We introduce DISTIQUE, a new statistically consistent summary method for inferring species trees from gene trees under the coalescent model. We generalize our results to arbitrary phylogenetic inference problems; we show that two arbitrarily chosen leaves, called anchors, can be used to estimate relative distances between all other pairs of leaves by inferring relevant quartet trees. This results in a family of distance-based tree inference methods, with running times ranging between quadratic to quartic in the number of leaves.
  
  
  
  We show in simulated studies that DISTIQUE has comparable accuracy to leading coalescent-based summary methods and reduced running times.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla CA, 92093, USA.
authors.forename: Erfan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sayyari
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr, La Jolla CA, 92093, USA. smirarab@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Siavash
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mirarab
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D008322:Mammals / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010802:Phylogeny
keywords: Incomplete lineage sorting; Multi-species coalescent; Quartet methods; Species tree