A Self-adaptive Ant Colony Algorithm for Phylogenetic Tree Construction

To solve the phylogenetic tree construction problem, a new method using adaptive ant colony algorithm based on the equilibrium of the ant distribution is presented. Before the problem is solved by the developed ant colony optimization, the input species were represented using a fully-connected graph built according to the evolutionary distance between each pair of species. The process of constructing a phylogenetic tree uses a pheromone graph. The information weight of the pheromone graph is adaptively updated according to the pheromone left by ants in their seeking process. The algorithm dynamically adjusts the influence of each ant to the trail information updating and the selected probability of the path according to the equilibrium of the ant distribution. The phylogenetic tree constructing method proposed here is tested using some test cases to compare its results with that of the Neighbor-Joining (NJ) programs in the PHYLIP software package and the TSP-Approach. Experimental results show that our algorithm is easier to implement and more efficient.