New version of findMRCA for large trees

I just posted a new version of findMRCA that also works for very large trees. This is accomplished by using the new function (fastMRCA) that I posted earlier today. This function still calls nodeHeights, so for extremely large trees, it is still quite slow, but I it can still compute for up to at least 60,000 tips.

Just to reminder readers, findMRCA finds the MRCA of a list of species in a vector. It originally used the ape utility function mrca - but the problem with using that function is that it computes a n × n matrix of MRCAs for n species. This will be prohibitive for larger phylogenies.

The difference between the new and old versions of this function are even apparent even for relatively small trees. Let's try a tree with just 200 tips:

> require(phytools)
> tree<-rtree(n=200)
> system.time(a<-findMRCA(tree,c("t102","t112","t38","t145")))
   user  system elapsed 
   1.48    0.00    1.50 
> a
[1] 279
> source("findMRCA.R")
> system.time(b<-findMRCA(tree,c("t102","t112","t38","t145")))
   user  system elapsed 
   0.06    0.00    0.06 
> b
[1] 279

Direct link to the new function is here. I have also posted a new nonstatic version of phytools with the updated function. It can be downloaded from the following link and installed from source.