Felsenstein's tree-pruning algorithm [SEP] named after
Felsenstein's tree-pruning algorithm
In statistical genetics, Felsenstein's tree-pruning algorithm (or Felsenstein's tree-peeling algorithm), attributed to Joseph Felsenstein, is an algorithm for computing the likelihood of an evolutionary tree from nucleic acid sequence data. 
The algorithm is often used as a subroutine in a search for a maximum likelihood estimate for an evolutionary tree. Further, it can be used in a hypothesis test for whether evolutionary rates are constant (by using likelihood ratio tests). It can also be used
these probabilities over the posterior distributions over the parameters of the evolutionary model and the space of all possible trees. This can be expressed as an application of Bayes' theorem:
formula_6
where "S" represents the ancestral states, "D" corresponds to the observed data, and formula_7 represents both the evolutionary model and the phylogenetic tree. formula_8 is the likelihood of the observed data which can be computed by Felsenstein's pruning algorithm as given above. formula_9 is the prior probability of the ancestral states for a given model