Abstract
In phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequence data, partitioning involves estimating independent models of molecular evolution for different sets of sites in a sequence alignment. Choosing an appropriate partitioning scheme is an important step in most analyses because it can affect the accuracy of phylogenetic reconstruction. Despite this, partitioning schemes are often chosen without explicit statistical justification. Here, we describe two new objective methods for the combined selection of best-fit partitioning . These methods allow millions of partitioning schemes to be compared in realistic time frames and so permit the objective selection of partitioning schemes even forlarge multilocus DNA data sets. We demonstrate that these methods significantly outperform previous approaches,including both the ad hoc selection of partitioning schemes (e.g., partitioning by gene or codon position) and a recently proposed hierarchical clustering method. We have implemented these methods in an open-source program, PartitionFinder. This program allows users to select partitioning schemes and substitution models using a range of information-theoretic metrics (e.g., the Bayesian information criterion, akaike information criterion [AIC], and correctedAIC). We hope that PartitionFinder will encourage the objective selection of partitioning schemes and thus lead to improvements in phylogenetic analyses.