A fast and memory-efficient implementation of the transfer bootstrap

Motivation: Recently, Lemoine et al. suggested the transfer bootstrap expectation (TBE) branch support metric as an alternative to classical phylogenetic bootstrap support for taxon-rich datasets. However, the original TBE implementation in the booster tool is compute- and memory-intensive. Results: We developed a fast and memory-efficient TBE implementation. We improve upon the original algorithm by Lemoine et al. via several algorithmic and technical optimizations. On empirical as well as on random tree sets with varying taxon counts, our implementation is up to 480 times faster than booster. Furthermore, it only requires memory that is linear in the number of taxa, which leads to 10x to 40x memory savings compared with booster.