Evaluation of the models handling heterotachy in phylogenetic inference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The evolutionary rate at a given homologous position varies across time. When sufficiently pronounced, this phenomenon - called heterotachy - may produce artefactual phylogenetic reconstructions under the commonly used models of sequence evolution. These observations have motivated the development of models that explicitly recognize heterotachy, with research directions proposed along two main axes: 1) the covarion approach, where sites switch from variable to invariable states; and 2) the mixture of branch lengths (MBL) approach, where alignment patterns are assumed to arise from one of several sets of branch lengths, under a given phylogeny. RESULTS: Here, we report the first statistical comparisons contrasting the performance of covarion and MBL modeling strategies. Using simulations under heterotachous conditions, we explore the properties of three model comparison methods: the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion, and cross validation. Although more time consuming, cross validation appears more reliable than AIC and BIC as it directly measures the predictive power of a model on 'future' data. We also analyze three large datasets (nuclear proteins of animals, mitochondrial proteins of mammals, and plastid proteins of plants), and find the optimal number of components of the MBL model to be two for all datasets, indicating that this model is preferred over the standard homogeneous model. However, the covarion model is always favored over the optimal MBL model. CONCLUSION: We demonstrated, using three large datasets, that the covarion model is more efficient at handling heterotachy than the MBL model. This is probably due to the fact that the MBL model requires a serious increase in the number of parameters, as compared to two supplementary parameters of the covarion approach. Further improvements of the both the mixture and the covarion approaches might be obtained by modeling heterogeneous behavior both along time and across sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".