- Maximum likelihood attempts to find the phylogenetic tree and evolutionary model that have the highest probability of producing the observed sequence data.
- The likelihood of observing the data depends on the evolutionary model used to generate the sequences. More complex models with more parameters will generally fit the data better but can also overfit.
- Bayesian inference finds the tree topology and parameters that have the highest posterior probability given the data, using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling to approximate the posterior probabilities when they cannot be calculated directly.