When can we reconstruct the ancestral state? A unified theory

Lam Si Tung Ho and Vu Dinh

Theoretical Population Biology, 2022, vol. 148, issue C, 22-27

Abstract: Ancestral state reconstruction is one of the most important tasks in evolutionary biology. Conditions under which we can reliably reconstruct the ancestral state have been studied for both discrete and continuous traits. However, the connection between these results is unclear, and it seems that each model needs different conditions. In this work, we provide a unifying theory on the consistency of ancestral state reconstruction for various types of trait evolution models. Notably, we show that for a sequence of nested trees with bounded heights, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a consistent ancestral state reconstruction method under discrete models, the Brownian motion model, and the threshold model are equivalent. When tree heights are unbounded, we provide a simple counter-example to show that this equivalence is no longer valid.

Keywords: Ancestral state reconstruction; Consistency; Big bang condition; Phylogenetic comparative methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040580922000648
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:148:y:2022:i:c:p:22-27

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2022.09.001

Access Statistics for this article

Theoretical Population Biology is currently edited by Jeremy Van Cleve

More articles in Theoretical Population Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().