PartitionFinder
PartitionFinder is a Mac OSX program for selecting best-fit partitioning schemes and models of molecular evolution for DNA sequence data. PartitionFinder is designed to take the hard work out of comparing partitioning schemes for DNA alignments, and to help users select a scheme that maximises the fit of the data to the model without including more parameters than are necessary. PartitionFinder is useful in any situation where you wish to compare partitioning schemes for molecular sequence data, and it also does all of the model selection into the bargain. Using PartitionFinder, you can choose partitioning schemes and models of molecular evolution based on any of three information-theoretic measures: the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc), and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). PartitionFinder should work on any Mac system, as long as you have Mac OSX 10.4 or above.
To download the program and its manual, or to look at a detailed tutorial please click one of the following links:
Questions, suggestions, problems, feedback? Please visit the PartitionFinder google group or subscribe below
Citation
If you use PartitionFinder for your published work, please cite the following paper:
PartitionFinder: combined selection of partitioning schemes and substitution models for phylogenetic analyses
Lanfear R, Calcott B, Ho SYW, Guindon S (2012) Molecular Biology and Evolution in press.
Partition Finder