Generalized frequency coding: A method of preparing polymorphic multistatecharacters for phylogenetic analysis

A new method of coding polymorphic multistate characters for phylogenetic a nalysis is presented. By dividing such characters into subcharacters, their frequency distributions can be represented with discrete states. Different ial weighting is used to counter the effect of representing one character w ith multiple characters. The new method, generalized frequency coding (GFC) , is potentially superior to previously used methods in that it incorporate s more information and is applicable to both qualitative and quantitative c haracters. When applied to a previously published data set that includes bo th types of polymorphic multistate characters, the method performed well, a s assessed with g1 and nonparametric bootstrap statistics and giving result s congruent with those of other studies. The data set was also used to comp are GFC with both gap-weighting and Manhattan distance step matrix coding. On these grounds and for philosophical reasons, we consider GFC to be a bet ter estimator of phylogeny.