Abstract
A new simple method is proposed for reconstructing phylogenetic trees, which we call the spectral method. The most common distance based method is the neighbor-joining method which is based on the minimum evolution principle. The spectral method shows similar performance to the neighbor-joining method for simulated data generated by seq-gen. For real data, the spectral method shows much better performance than the neighbor-joining method. Hence it can be a complementary method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees.