Least Square Method for inferring Phylogenic trees

Abstract

Nowadays, an important problem in Biomathematics is how to efficiently compute the length for the phylogenic tree branches. The approach followed herein is to employ the distance matrices method which leads to least square problems. The related tree construction strategy then generates block tridiagonal systems of linear equations. Experiments in solving them with the conjugate gradient method coupled to different block preconditioners were performed. Preliminary results confirm a high performance for some preconditioning choices.