Recursive bind.tree function

A phytools user contacted me today about coding a recursive version of ape::bind.tree - that is, a function that would take a list of trees & bind them successively together (based on his code, at the root) until only one tree remained.

A recursive function is nothing more than a function that calls itself internally. These are possible, though (in my experience) not that common, in R.

I'm not sure why we'd want to do this since a simple for or while loop could do the same thing, but I thought I'd help him out anyway.

Here's my recursive function:

bind.trees<-function(trees){
    if(length(trees)==2) return(bind.tree(trees[[1]],trees[[2]]))
    else { 
        trees<-c(bind.tree(trees[[1]],trees[[2]]),
            if(length(trees)>2) trees[3:length(trees)])
        trees<-bind.trees(trees) ## this is the recursive part
        return(trees)
    }
}

We can test it out as follows:

trees<-lapply(sample(2:20,9,replace=TRUE),rtree)
trees<-lapply(trees,function(x){
    x$root.edge<-runif(n=1)
    x})
class(trees)<-"multiPhylo"
print(trees,details=TRUE)

## 9 phylogenetic trees
## tree 1 : 7 tips
## tree 2 : 15 tips
## tree 3 : 12 tips
## tree 4 : 11 tips
## tree 5 : 17 tips
## tree 6 : 10 tips
## tree 7 : 12 tips
## tree 8 : 19 tips
## tree 9 : 3 tips

par(mfrow=c(3,3))
plotTree(trees,lwd=1)

tree<-bind.trees(trees)
plotTree(tree,fsize=0.6,lwd=1)

Or, to better see the structure of all our original trees:

tree$edge.length<-NULL
plotTree(tree,fsize=0.5,type="cladogram",nodes="centered",lwd=1)

That's it.