SDA*: A Simple and Unifying Solution to Recent Bioinformatic Challenges for Conservation Genetics

Abstract

Recently, several algorithms have been proposed to tackle different conservation questions under phylogenetic diversity. Such questions are variants of the more general problem of budgeted reserve selection under split diversity, an NP-hard problem. Here, we present a novel framework, Split Diversity Algorithm* (SDA*), to unify all these attempts. More specifically, SDA* transforms the budgeted reserve selection problem into a binary linear programming(BLP), that can be solved by available linear optimization techniques. SDA* guarantees to find optimal solutions in reasonable time.