An ant colony optimisation algorithm for constructing phylogenetic tree

We present a new method for constructing the phylogenetic tree from a given set of gene sequences. The method first bisects the set of gene sequences into subsets so that the sequences are similar to one another within the same subset and are dissimilar to the ones in the other subset. Such bisecting procedure is executed recursively until each of the subset contains only one gene sequence. With these subsets in different levels, a phylogenetic tree is progressively constructed. Each level of bisecting is based on the ant colony optimisation algorithm. Our phylogenetic tree-constructing method is tested to compare its performance with that of the other similar methods. Experimental results show that our method can obtain higher speed, superior quality results and is easier to implement.