Adding colorful error bars to internal node values using phytools::contMap

Today a R-sig-phylo member posted the following question:

“I was wondering about plotting the output of an ancestral state 'reconstruction' of a continuous trait while incorporating at least some of the uncertainty around the estimates.

One approach I thought of was to map the ASR onto a tree in a standard way, then at each node have essentially a mini-legend that is of a length reflecting the width of the confidence interval of the estimate at that node, and is coloured on the same colour-scale as the overall tree legend. For instance, if the colour scheme for the tree goes from blue through yellow to red as the value increases, then a node with a relatively precise and high estimate will have a short bar only ranging through different shades of red, whereas a highly uncertain low estimate will have a wider bar coloured from (say) dark blue to orange/light red. I hope that description makes sense.”

This is cannot be done automatically in phytools, but it is relatively straightforward to accomplish. For the record, I thought this would look terrible - but it actually looks better than I expected.

One key trick is that if we want our 'error bars' to show the 95% CIs for our ancestral values, we have to first find the total range of all such intervals and then use those to specify the range (argument lims) in our contMap calculation:

## load our package
library(phytools)
## here's our tree & data
tree

## 
## Phylogenetic tree with 12 tips and 11 internal nodes.
## 
## Tip labels:
##  A, B, C, D, E, F, ...
## 
## Rooted; includes branch lengths.

x

##          A          B          C          D          E          F 
##  1.6716660  0.8798575  1.5227959  1.1046503  1.3339632 -0.9191693 
##          G          H          I          J          K          L 
## -0.9052098 -0.4977580 -0.6099311 -1.3487360 -1.6726186 -0.5795939

## get ancestral states with CIs
aa<-fastAnc(tree,x,CI=TRUE)
xlim<-range(aa$CI95) ## our range for the "contMap" object
## compute our "contMap" object
obj<-contMap(tree,x,lims=xlim,plot=FALSE)
obj

## Object of class "contMap" containing:
## 
## (1) A phylogenetic tree with 12 tips and 11 internal nodes.
## 
## (2) A mapped continuous trait on the range (-1.657191, 2.200442).

plot(obj,xlim=c(-0.12,2.2)) ## to accommodate the root node label
d<-diff(obj$lims)
n<-length(obj$cols)-1
lastPP<-get("last_plot.phylo",envir=.PlotPhyloEnv)
h<-max(nodeHeights(tree))
for(i in 1:tree$Nnode){
    ii<-round((aa$CI95[i,1]-obj$lims[1])/d*n)
    jj<-round((aa$CI95[i,2]-obj$lims[1])/d*(n+1))
    cols<-obj$cols[ii:jj]   
    add.color.bar(leg=0.05*h,cols=cols,prompt=FALSE,
        x=lastPP$xx[i+Ntip(tree)]-0.025*h,
        y=lastPP$yy[i+Ntip(tree)],title="",subtitle="",lims=NULL,
        lwd=14)
}

That's it. If we want to change our color scheme, that is also no problem:

obj<-setMap(obj,colors=c("black","white"))
plot(obj,xlim=c(-0.12,2.2))
d<-diff(obj$lims)
n<-length(obj$cols)-1
lastPP<-get("last_plot.phylo",envir=.PlotPhyloEnv)
h<-max(nodeHeights(tree))
for(i in 1:tree$Nnode){
    ii<-round((aa$CI95[i,1]-obj$lims[1])/d*n)
    jj<-round((aa$CI95[i,2]-obj$lims[1])/d*(n+1))
    cols<-obj$cols[ii:jj]   
    add.color.bar(leg=0.05*h,cols=cols,prompt=FALSE,
        x=lastPP$xx[i+Ntip(tree)]-0.025*h,
        y=lastPP$yy[i+Ntip(tree)],title="",subtitle="",lims=NULL,
        lwd=14)
}

Neat.

Obviously, any of the parameters of the error bars - their length (here set to 5% of the total tree length), width, etc., can easily be changed by modifying the code above.

The tree & data for this exercise were simulated as follows:

tree<-pbtree(n=12,tip.label=LETTERS[1:12])
x<-fastBM(tree)

That's all.