pikun: An Information Theoretic Toolkit for Analysis and Visualization of Species Delimitation Metric Space

Abstract

BackgroundExisting 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. Resultspiikun 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 criterion [2], a true metric or distance function for species delimitation models that is aligned with the lattice of partitions. Conclusionspiikun 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.