Phylogenies are central to many research areas in biology and commonly estimated using likelihood-based methods. Unfortunately, any likelihood-based method, including Bayesian inference, can be restrictively slow for large datasets-with many taxa and/or many sites in the sequence alignment-or complex substitutions models. The primary limiting factor when using large datasets and/or complex models in probabilistic phylogenetic analyses is the likelihood calculation, which dominates the total computation time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF