CONSENSUS TECHNIQUES AND THE COMPARISON
Adams, E. N. III (Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana, 111. 61801) 1972. Consensus techniques and the comparison of taxonomic trees. Syst. Zool. 21: 390 397. A new problem in the science of classification is presented, along with its solution. The problem is to combine the information in several taxonomic trees into a single tree. The solution is a computational method for computing a tree which represents only that information shared by all the rival trees. Such a method, called the consensus method, can be used to "compare" several rival tree representations or to compute a more stable tree from slightly perturbed variants of the original data. A method is defined and demonstrated for each of two different types of trees: rooted, fully labelled trees, and rooted trees with unlabelled internal nodes. [Classification; trees.