Sunday, December 7, 2014

Fossil version of locate.yeti to place taxa in a tree using continuous characters

I have now posted development code for a fossil version of the phytools function locate.yeti, called locate.fossil.

This function uses ML to place a single fossil tip into a tree based on continuous character data. It allows the user to impose a time.constraint, in the form of a time range for the fossil. If the age of the fossil is known precisely, this can just be a single numeric value; and if the user wants to supply it (rather than as a height above the root) as a time before present, this should be given as a negative scalar. Note that time.constraint constrains only the height of the tip, and not at all the height of the attachment of the terminal edge to the tree - except inasmuch as this must precede in time the height of the tip of course! The user can also supply an edge.constraint which constrains the edges of the tree to which the tip can attach. Obviously, these must be compatible with time.constraint or the function will not work.

Here's a demo of estimation using simulated data:

library(phytools)
library(mnormt)
## here is our true tree (normally unknown)
plotTree(true.tree,ftype="i",fsize=0.8)

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

## simulate data
X<-fastBM(true.tree,nsim=20)
## drop tip to recreate the empirical backbone tree
tree<-drop.tip(true.tree,"fossil")
plotTree(tree,ftype="i",fsize=0.8)

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

## now let's make an age constraint based on the real (known) age of 
## the fossil lineage:
h<-nodeHeights(true.tree)[true.tree$edge[,2]==which(true.tree$tip.label=="fossil"),2]
max(nodeHeights(tree))-h
## [1] 30.14439
age.range<-c(h-5,h+5)
age.range
## [1] 64.85561 74.85561
## load source code for locate.fossil
source("locate.fossil.R")
mltree<-locate.fossil(tree,X,time.constraint=age.range,plot=FALSE)
## Optimizing the phylogenetic position of fossil using ML. Please wait....
## Done.
## plot the result
plotTree(mltree,mar=c(2.1,0.1,3.1,0.1),ftype="i",fsize=0.8)
axis(1)
obj<-lapply(age.range,function(x,tree) lines(rep(x,2),
    c(0,Ntip(tree)+1),col="red",lty="dashed"),tree=tree)
title(paste("Optimized position of taxon \"",setdiff(rownames(X),tree$tip.label),
    "\"",sep=""))

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

The function also contains an option to plot the progress of the likelihood search. This is somewhat difficult to illustrate on the web. (I attempted to use saveGIF from the 'animation' package, but was having trouble for some unknown reason.)

That's it for now.

3 comments:

  1. A few queries:

    1) What's the minimum size of the branch the fossil taxon attaches to the tree with? Do you allow for zero-length branches? (A ZLB would essentially mean its a direct ancestor of an extant lineage...)

    2) Would it be possible to constrain the search to only consider scenarios where the taxon is connected by a ZLB? Then one could compare the likelihood scores (using an LRT, I think) to test if a fossil specimen was likely to be a direct ancestor or not (which is a feasible hypothesis and an pertinent question in some cases...).

    ReplyDelete
  2. 1) Yes, zero.

    2) Not presently, but theoretically straightforward.

    This is a prototype function right now - it computes the likelihood correctly, but I don't know about optimization and/or constraints on the optimization. I will be working on it more.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ah, well, cool function nonetheless!

    ReplyDelete

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