pitchforks: Number of pitchforks
In phyloTop: Calculating Topological Properties of Phylogenies

pitchforks

R Documentation

Number of pitchforks

Description

Finds the number of pitchforks in a tree. A pitchfork is considered to be a clade with three tips.

Usage

pitchforks(tree, normalise = FALSE)

Arguments

`tree`	a tree of class `phylo` or `phylo4`. The tree should be binary and rooted; if not it will be coerced into a binary rooted tree using multi2di, if possible.
`normalise`	option to normalise the result, default is `FALSE`.

Value

An integer representing the number of pitchforks in the tree.

Author(s)

Michelle Kendall michelle.louise.kendall@gmail.com

Examples

## Find the number of pitchforks in a random tree with 20 tips:
tree <- rtree(20)
plot(tree)
pitchforks(tree)
# and the normalised pitchfork number:
pitchforks(tree, normalise=TRUE)

## Note that the function configShow can be used to highlight the pitchforks in the tree:
configShow(tree, 3, edge.width=2)

phyloTop documentation built on Aug. 27, 2025, 9:08 a.m.