R Hackathon 1/Trait Evolution SG
From Phyloinformatics
- Participants: Harmon, Hipp, Hunt
Targets.
- Compare various implementations of the same methods (ape, geiger, OUCH, Mesquite)
- Improve functionality of character fitting in R
- Identify gaps in current implementation
Accomplishments.
- Evaluated the results of continuous character analyses in different packages
- Packages are mostly consistent
- Discrepancies come from two sources:
- Different approaches (e.g. marginal versus joint likelihood)
- Difficulties in finding the ML solution
- For continuous characters:
- geiger and OUCH tend to return the same parameter estimates, but different likelihoods.
- the Brownian motion model is relatively easy to fit, with results that seem to be compatible across packages
- the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model with one optimum is a more difficult model to fit. There is often a large, nearly flat ridge in the log-likelihood surface, and different optimization routines and settings may stop at different places along this ridge. This can yield rather different parameter estimates, although the log-likelihoods should not vary as much.
- geiger and OUCH tend to return the same parameter estimates, but different likelihoods.
- For discrete characters
- geiger and mesquite are consistent, returning the same parameter estimates and likelihoods
- geiger and ape are different
- ape is reporting the joint likelihoods for ancestral states. This uses the single set of ancestral states that together result in the highest likelihood on the whole tree.
- mesquite and geiger use marginal likelihoods for ancestral states. This represents the likelihood averaged over all possible ancestral character state values.
- This also means that you get different ancestral state reconstructions from ape and mesquite
- Improved functionality
- geiger was modified to give more reliable results by a more thorough search of the likelihood surface (fitContinuous)
- geiger can deal with a more general set of discrete character models (fitDiscrete)
- geiger's tree transformations now work for nonultrametric trees
- Identify gaps in current implementation
- The main gap, from an end-user perspective, is obtaining estimates of ancestral character states in R
- ape does this, but only for joint likelihoods, and the function sometimes has trouble finding the ML solution
- There is no way to get marginal ancestral character states for discrete characters in r other than interfacing with Mesquite
To do
- Implement "white noise" and Brownian motion with a trend models in geiger's fitContinuous
- Investigate statistical properties of these methods
- Which models can we tell apart?
- How much data are needed?
- Are parameter estimates biased?
- Performance of different model selection criteria (LRT, information criteria)