R: Character information content

CharacterInformation {TreeTools} | R Documentation

## Character information content

### Description

`CharacterInformation()` calculates the cladistic information content (Steel and Penny 2006) of a given character, in bits. The total information in all characters gives a measure of the potential utility of a dataset (Cotton and Wilkinson 2008), which can be compared with a profile parsimony score (Faith and Trueman 2001) to evaluate the degree of homoplasy within a dataset.

### Usage

    CharacterInformation(tokens)

### Arguments

`tokens` | Character vector specifying the tokens assigned to each taxon for a character. Example: `c(0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, '?', '-')`. Note that ambiguous tokens such as `(01)` are not supported, and should be replaced with `?`.

### Value

`CharacterInformation()` returns a numeric specifying the phylogenetic information content of the character (sensu Steel and Penny 2006), in bits.

### Author(s)

Martin R. Smith (martin.smith@durham.ac.uk)

### References

- Cotton JA, Wilkinson M (2008). “Quantifying the potential utility of phylogenetic characters.” Taxon, 57(1), 131–136.
  Faith DP, Trueman JWH (2001). “Towards an inclusive philosophy for phylogenetic inference.” Systematic Biology, 50(3), 331–350. doi: 10.1080/10635150118627.
  Steel MA, Penny D (2006). “Maximum parsimony and the phylogenetic information in multistate characters.” In Albert VA (ed.), Parsimony, Phylogeny, and Genomics, 163–178. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

### See Also

Other split information functions: `SplitInformation()`, `SplitMatchProbability()`, `TreesMatchingSplit()`, `UnrootedTreesMatchingSplit()`

[Package TreeTools version 1.7.2 Index]