What is a distance based method of phylogenetic analysis?
Distance-based methods use the dissimilarity (the distance) between the two sequences to construct trees. They are much less computationally intensive than the character based methods are mostly accurate as they take mutations into count.
Distance based phylogenetic reconstruction methods use a pairwise distance estimate between the input organisms to reconstruct trees. The distances are an estimate of the evolutionary distance between each pair of organisms which are usually computed from DNA or amino acid sequences.
Fast and accurate distance-based phylogenetic placement using divide and conquer.