Phytools has a function, make.simmap, that can be used to generate stochastic character mapped trees for discretely valued character data and phylogenies. This function, though, is really a much simplified version of Jonathan Bollback's stand alone program SIMMAP. The biggest difference between stochastic mapping in his program and with phytools::make.simmap is that my function first fits a model of character evolution using ML, and then samples from the conditional posterior distribution of character histories (conditioning on the fitted model), rather than the joint posterior distribution of substitution rates and character histories.
Some phytools users might therefore be interested in exporting their character data & trees for analysis in SIMMAP. In fact, I can attest to this because I want to do it - mainly to cross-validate a result that I obtained using make.simmap in phytools. Phytools can already be used to read in stochastic histories generated using SIMMAP (now both v1.0 and v1.5).
SIMMAP (v1.5, I'll get to v1.0 later) reads trees and data in XML format. XML is a markup language, like HTML, using tags for different components of the data structure. SIMMAP can read both DNA and discrete, numerically coded morphological traits. The former is called datatype="nucleotide" by SIMMAP and the latter datatype="standard" by SIMMAP.
I have now posted a function online, export.as.xml, that can create an XML datafile using data stored in various formats and a tree or multiple trees stored as a "phylo" or "multiPhylo" object (respectively).
A direct link to the code is here. I will also most likely include it in future releases of phytools. (I may also include the capacity to export for SIMMAP v1.0. SIMMAP v1.0 does not use XML, but a modified NEXUS format, and is still in fairly wide use.)
Hi Liam - Thanks for the SimMap tools, I'm going to look into these. However, the link behind "here" is broken from this post.
ReplyDeleteHi Todd. I think this just appears broken because your browser tries to read the R source file as XML. Try right clicking on the link and choosing "save link as" or "save link target as". Then you should be able to load the source into R. Let me know if this works.
ReplyDelete- Liam
You are right, it is there. My computer kept trying to read it as an xml file, presumably because xml is in the title -- even though the final extension is .R. Sorry about that.
ReplyDelete