Creating a traitgram for the set of trees in a sample using phytools

A friend & phytools user contacted me today about plotting a traitgram using the phytools function phenogram in which we superimposed the set of trees from a posterior distribution of a Bayesian analysis.

This is not too difficult to do, although there are some complications.

Firstly, the function phenogram already includes the option add=TRUE which allows you to add one traitgram to an existing traitgram.

The difficult is that trees in a posterior sample will invariably have different depths.

The easiest solution to this is to add a root edge to each tree so that it's total length (including the root edge) is the same, and then convert it to a "phylo" object with singleton nodes using rootedge.to.singleton.

The only problem with that is that fastAnc (the default ancestral state reconstruction method of phenogram) uses contrasts internally, and so only works on a bifurcating tree*. (*Actually, it works with multifurcations too - just not with unbranching nodes.)

My work-around for this was to just estimate ancestral states on the tree without the singleton node, and then set the node value before the root edge to be equal to that of the ingroup root. (This is the case for ML under BM anyway.) Then, I painted the crown group and the root edge with different states using paintSubTree, and plotted them using phenogram.

Here's what the code looks like:

library(phytools)

## Loading required package: ape

## Loading required package: maps

Trees<-read.nexus("anguila.nex")
Data<-read.csv("elopomorph.csv",row.names=1)
Length<-setNames(Data[,2],rownames(Data))
Trees<-drop.tip.multiPhylo(Trees,
    setdiff(Trees[[1]]$tip.label,
    names(Length)))

h<-sapply(Trees,function(x) max(nodeHeights(x)))
ii<-order(h,decreasing=TRUE)
Trees<-Trees[ii]
h<-h[ii]
Trees<-mapply(function(x,r){ x$root.edge<-r; x },
    x=Trees,r=max(h)-h,SIMPLIFY=FALSE)
Trees<-lapply(Trees,rootedge.to.singleton)

for(i in 1:length(Trees)){
    a<-fastAnc(collapse.singles(Trees[[i]]),Length)
    a<-setNames(c(a[1],a),1:Trees[[i]]$Nnode+Ntip(Trees[[i]]))
    Trees[[i]]<-paintSubTree(Trees[[i]],node=Ntip(Trees[[i]])+2,
        state="1",anc.state="0")
    cols<-setNames(c("transparent",make.transparent(palette()[4],
        1/length(Trees))),0:1)
    phenogram(Trees[[i]],c(Length,a),spread.cost=c(1,0),
        fsize=0.5,ftype="i",color=cols,add=(i>1),quiet=TRUE)
}