DASACT: A decision aiding software for axiomatic consensus theory

•New decision aiding software for recommending and generating consensus trees.•Recommending most relevant consensus functions out of 17 different functions.•Aiding based on user's preferences on a selection of 9 axiomatic properties.•Pre-processed associated concept lattice used as knowledge space for recommendation.•Consensus tree generation for arbitrary set of input trees.

There have been various attempts, solutions, and approaches towards constructing an appropriate consensus tree based on a given set of phylogenetic trees. However, for practitioners, it is not always clear, for a given data set, which of these would create the most relevant consensus tree. In this paper, we introduce an open-source software called DASACT (Decision Aiding Software for Axiomatic Consensus Theory) created to assist practitioners on choosing the most appropriate consensus function. It is based on an exhaustive evaluation of axiomatic properties and consensus functions, which define the knowledge space as a concept lattice. Using a selection of axiomatic properties provided by the user, it is able to aid the user in choosing the most suitable function. DASACT is freely available at http://www.cs.unic.ac.cy/florent/software.htm.