V2 of my preprint with PhD student Kim Verity is now online: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20…
tldr: If you want to assess the shape (e.g. balance, diversity) of a rooted tree then generally you're better off using our new indices than Sackin's index, phylogenetic entropy, etc.
The article is long mainly because we provide lots of examples. I plan soon to write a shorter #mathonco blog post explaining why these indices are better than prior approaches. Meanwhile, here's a poster.
A new universal system of tree shape indices
The comparison and categorization of tree diagrams is fundamental to large parts of biology, linguistics, computer science, and other fields, yet the indices currently applied to describing tree shape have important flaws that complicate their interp…bioRxiv