The Fossilized Birth-Death Model Is Identifiable.

ABSTRACT: Time-dependent birth-death sampling models have been used in numerous studies to infer past evolutionary dynamics in different biological contexts, for example,  speciation and extinction rates in macroevolutionary studies, or effective reproductive number in epidemiological studies. These models are branching processes where lineages can bifurcate, die, or be sampled with time-dependent birth, death, and sampling rates, generating phylogenetic trees. It has been shown that in some subclasses of such models, different sets of rates can result in the same distributions of reconstructed phylogenetic trees, and therefore, the rates become unidentifiable from the trees regardless of their size. Here, we show that widely used time-dependent fossilized birth-death (FBD) models are identifiable.

SUBMITTER: Truman K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11997801 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature