Piikun: an information theoretic toolkit for analysis and visualization of species delimitation metric space
Jeet Sukumaran1, Marina Meila2
1Biology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA. jsukumaran@sdsu.edu.
Background:
Existing software for comparison of species delimitation models do not provide a (true) metric or distance functions between species delimitation models, nor a way to compare these models in terms of relative clustering differences along a lattice of partitions.
Results:
Piikun is a Python package for analyzing and visualizing species delimitation models in an information theoretic framework that, in addition to classic measures of information such as the entropy and mutual information [1], provides for the calculation of the Variation of Information (VI) criterion [2], a true metric or distance function for species delimitation models that is aligned with the lattice of partitions.
Conclusions:
Piikun is available under the MIT license from its public repository ( https://github.com/jeetsukumaran/piikun ), and can be installed locally using the Python package manager 'pip'.
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