Piikun: an information theoretic toolkit for analysis and visualization of species delimitation metric space.

Abstract

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'.