Stemmatology

Method, maximum parsimony

Maximum parsimony is a method for inferring relationships between witnesses, biological sequences or other data by finding the relationship that minimises the number of changes that needs to be invoked to account for the observed data. In general, this implies that witnesses will be grouped according to readings they share to the exclusion of others.

In other languages

DE: Methode der maximalen Parsimonie, or English used
FR: méthode de la parcimonie maximum
IT: metodo della massima parsimonia

CH, HW