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Systematic Biology 2004 53(4):529-532; doi:10.1080/10635150490470320
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© 2004 Society of Systematic Biologists

A Method for Estimating the Relative Importance of Characters in Cladistic Analyses

David Degusta

Department of Anthropological Sciences Building 360, Stanford University Stanford CA 94305–2117 USA; E-mail: degusta{at}stanford.edu

Edited by Dan Faith: Associate Editor


  Abstract

The method of character importance ranking (CIR) is proposed here as a means for estimating the relative "importance" of characters in cladistic analyses, especially those based on morphological features. CIR uses the weighting variable to incrementally remove one character at a time from the analysis, and then evaluates the impact of the removal on the shape of the cladogram. The greater the impact, the more important the character. The CIR method for determining which characters drive the shape of a particular cladogram has several applications. It identifies the characters with the strongest (though not necessarily most accurate) signal in a cladistic analysis; it permits the informed prioritization of characters for further investigation via genetic, developmental, and functional approaches; and it highlights characters whose definition, scoring, independence, and variation should be reviewed with particular care. The application of CIR reveals that at least some cladograms depend entirely on a single character.

Keywords: Character analysis; cladogram shape; importance; parsimony


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