Majority rule has transition ratio 4 on Yule trees under a 2-state symmetric model

JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY

卷:360

Letter

Mossel, Elchanan¹  Steel, Mike² 

[1] Univ Calif Berkeley, Dept Stat, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA

[2] Univ Canterbury, Biomath Res Ctr, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand

关键词: Yule pure-birth tree;    Markov process;    Ancestral state;    Information loss;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.07.029

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Inferring the ancestral state at the root of a phylogenetic tree from states observed at the leaves is a problem arising in evolutionary biology. The simplest technique - majority rule - estimates the root state by the most frequently occurring state at the leaves. Alternative methods - such as maximum parsimony - explicitly take the tree structure into account. Since either method can outperform the other on particular trees, it is useful to consider the accuracy of the methods on trees generated under some evolutionary null model, such as a Yule pure-birth model. In this short note, we answer a recently posed question concerning the performance of majority rule on Yule trees under a symmetric 2-state Markovian substitution model of character state change. We show that majority rule is accurate precisely when the ratio of the birth (speciation) rate of the Yule process to the substitution rate exceeds the value 4. By contrast, maximum parsimony has been shown to be accurate only when this ratio is at least 6. Our proof relies on a second moment calculation, coupling, and a novel application of a reflection principle. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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