Clearly, any function between Θ(n 2 k) and Θ(n 4 k) can be obtained by adjusting m. DISTIQUE’s default strategy requires O(n) anchors and therefore results in O(n 3 k) total running time. For the tree-sum approach, the running time of the supertree method needs to be also added. MRL, which we use here, doesn’t have running time guarantees, but ML methods tend to have average running time close to O(n 2) .