Author: Thijs Janzen
Date: 2026-05-20

# Getting started

#### Thijs Janzen

#### 2026-05-20

# Using treestats

The treestats package provides an easy to use interface to calculate summary statistics on phylogenetic trees. To obtain a list of all supported summary statistics use:

    list_statistics()

    ##  [1] "area_per_pair"          "average_leaf_depth"     "avg_ladder"
    ##  [4] "avg_vert_depth"         "b1"                     "b2"
    ##  [7] "beta"                   "blum"                   "cherries"
    ## [10] "colless"                "colless_corr"           "colless_quad"
    ## [13] "crown_age"              "diameter"               "double_cherries"
    ## [16] "eigen_centrality"       "eigen_centralityW"      "ew_colless"
    ## [19] "four_prong"             "gamma"                  "i_stat"
    ## [22] "il_number"              "imbalance_steps"        "j_one"
    ## [25] "j_stat"                 "laplace_spectrum_a"     "laplace_spectrum_e"
    ## [28] "laplace_spectrum_g"     "laplace_spectrum_p"     "max_adj"
    ## [31] "max_betweenness"        "max_closeness"          "max_closenessW"
    ## [34] "max_del_width"          "max_depth"              "max_ladder"
    ## [37] "max_laplace"            "max_width"              "mean_branch_length"
    ## [40] "mean_branch_length_ext" "mean_branch_length_int" "min_adj"
    ## [43] "min_laplace"            "mntd"                   "mpd"
    ## [46] "mw_over_md"             "nltt_base"              "number_of_lineages"
    ## [49] "phylogenetic_div"       "pigot_rho"              "pitchforks"
    ## [52] "psv"                    "rogers"                 "root_imbalance"
    ## [55] "rquartet"               "sackin"                 "stairs"
    ## [58] "stairs2"                "symmetry_nodes"         "tot_coph"
    ## [61] "tot_internal_path"      "tot_path"               "tree_height"
    ## [64] "treeness"               "var_branch_length"      "var_branch_length_ext"
    ## [67] "var_branch_length_int"  "var_depth"              "vpd"
    ## [70] "wiener"

If your favourite summary statistic is missing, please let the maintainer know, treestats is a dynamic package always under development, and the maintainers are always looking for new statistics!

Given a phylogenetic tree, you can now use of the available functions to calculate your summary statistic of choice. Let’s take for instance the Colless statistic (and we generate a dummy tree):

    phy <- ape::rphylo(n = 100, birth = 1, death = 0.1)

    treestats::colless(phy)

    ## [1] 311

Looking at the documentation of the colless statistic (`?colless`), we find that the function also includes options to normalize for size: either ‘pda’ or ‘yule’:

    treestats::colless(phy, normalization = "yule")

    ## [1] -0.3792387

## Multiple statistics

The treestats package supports calculating many statistics in one go. For this, several functions have been set up aptly. Firstly, the function `calc_all_stats` will calculate all statistics:

    all_stats <- calc_all_stats(phy)

Similarly, we can also blanket apply all topology associated summary statistics:

    balance_stats <- calc_topology_stats(phy)
    unlist(balance_stats)

    ##      area_per_pair average_leaf_depth         avg_ladder     avg_vert_depth
    ##       1.281313e+01       7.970000e+00       2.125000e+00       7.015075e+00
    ##                 b1                 b2               beta               blum
    ##       5.375751e+01       5.655884e+00       5.046484e-01       1.110319e+02
    ##           cherries            colless       colless_corr       colless_quad
    ##       3.300000e+01       3.110000e+02       6.411049e-02       6.375000e+03
    ##           diameter    double_cherries   eigen_centrality         ew_colless
    ##       2.200000e+01       3.000000e+00       2.851932e-01       4.610119e-01
    ##         four_prong             i_stat          il_number    imbalance_steps
    ##       5.000000e+00       4.573502e-01       3.400000e+01       8.500000e+01
    ##              j_one    max_betweenness      max_closeness      max_del_width
    ##       8.336081e-01       1.206900e+04                 NA       1.200000e+01
    ##          max_depth         max_ladder          max_width         mw_over_md
    ##       1.400000e+01       3.000000e+00       3.600000e+01       2.571429e+00
    ##         pitchforks             rogers     root_imbalance           rquartet
    ##       1.900000e+01       6.200000e+01       7.800000e-01       3.680472e+06
    ##             sackin             stairs            stairs2     symmetry_nodes
    ##       7.970000e+02       6.262626e-01       6.570162e-01       6.200000e+01
    ##           tot_coph  tot_internal_path    tot_path_length          var_depth
    ##       7.739000e+03       5.990000e+02       1.396000e+03       5.369100e+00