MDL hierarchical clustering with incomplete data

The goal of stemmatology is to reconstruct a family tree of different variants of a text resulting from imperfect copying, which is a crucial part of textual criticism. In reality, historians often have incomplete data because some variants are not yet discovered and there are missing portions in available variants due to physical damage. Stemmatology is similar to molecular phylogenetics where biologists aim to reconstruct the evolutionary history of species based on genetic or protein sequences. Adoption of phylogenetics methods has lead to encouraging results in automatic stemmatology. We discuss and demonstrate the potential application of minimum description length (MDL) concepts to stemmatology. Our method is applied to a realistic dataset and outperforms major existing methods.