PhyPA: Phylogenetic method with pairwise sequence alignment outperforms likelihood methods in phylogenetics involving highly diverged sequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While pairwise sequence alignment (PSA) by dynamic programming is guaranteed to generate one of the optimal alignments, multiple sequence alignment (MSA) of highly divergent sequences often results in poorly aligned sequences, plaguing all subsequent phylogenetic analysis. One way to avoid this problem is to use only PSA to reconstruct phylogenetic trees, which can only be done with distance-based methods. I compared the accuracy of this new computational approach (named PhyPA for phylogenetics by pairwise alignment) against the maximum likelihood method using MSA (the ML+MSA approach), based on nucleotide, amino acid and codon sequences simulated with different topologies and tree lengths. I present a surprising discovery that the fast PhyPA method consistently outperforms the slow ML+MSA approach for highly diverged sequences even when all optimization options were turned on for the ML+MSA approach. Only when sequences are not highly diverged (i.e., when a reliable MSA can be obtained) does the ML+MSA approach outperforms PhyPA. The true topologies are always recovered by ML with the true alignment from the simulation. However, with MSA derived from alignment programs such as MAFFT or MUSCLE, the recovered topology consistently has higher likelihood than that for the true topology. Thus, the failure to recover the true topology by the ML+MSA is not because of insufficient search of tree space, but by the distortion of phylogenetic signal by MSA methods. I have implemented in DAMBE PhyPA and two approaches making use of multi-gene data sets to derive phylogenetic support for subtrees equivalent to resampling techniques such as bootstrapping and jackknifing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".