Trees of Unusual Size: Biased Inference of Early Bursts from Large Molecular Phylogenies
Figure 5
Proportion of Trees Showing Support for Temporally-Varying Speciation Model Using Coalescent Approximation.
Results from simulations showing the proportion of phylogenies for which a temporally-varying speciation (TVS) model (Model 4a of [23]) is preferred over a constant-rate birth-death model (BD; Model 3 of [23]) using AIC to select amongst the models. Both the models were formulated according to a coalescent-based approximation of the likelihood [23]. We used a AIC cutoff of 4 to favor the TVS model when the generating model was a constant-rate process. Extinction rate,
, varies across the plots (
); speciation rate,
, and total tree-depth,
are held constant (
and
). All are plotted against the expected number of taxa across the cumulative distribution of probability densities (from 0.99 to 0.01). The dashed vertical line represents the expected value for
under the simulating conditions. Each point represents 1000 simulations. (Results for
and
not shown.)