Long branch attraction

• abstract: Long branch attraction (LBA), a phenomenon in phylogenetic and clustering analyses, occurs if terminals or clades that are thought not to be one another's closest relatives cluster together due to misinterpretation of shared homoplasies, usually in DNA sequence data. It is a result of the way clustering algorithms work: terminals or taxa with many autapomorphies (character states unique to a single branch) may by chance (convergence) exhibit the same states as those on another branch.

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