Inference of a multi-states birth-death model from a phylogeny, comprising a number of states N, birth and death rates for each state and on which edges each state appears. Inference is done using a hybrid approach: states are progressively added in a greedy approach. For a fixed number of states N the best model is selected via maximum likelihood. Reference: J. Barido-Sottani and T. Stadler (2017) <doi:10.1101/215491>.