Recent phylogenetic analyses have turned away from maximum parsimony towards the probabilistic techniques of maximum likelihood and bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (BMCMC).

Our benchmarking exercise focused on Bayesian versus maximum parsimony (MP) algorithms, the effect of rate variation when modelled as a discrete gamma distribution 14, subsamples of taxa to infer ...

This field of research is called phylogenetics: the study of the evolutionary relationships between organisms. One approach for growing these trees is called parsimony.