Robustness of birth-death and gain models for inferring evolutionary events.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Phylogenetic birth-death models are opening a new window on the processes of genome evolution in studies of the evolution of gene and protein families, protein-protein interaction networks, microRNAs, and copy number variation. Given a species tree and a set of genomic characters in present-day species, the birth-death approach estimates the most likely rates required to explain the observed data and returns the expected ancestral character states and the history of character state changes. Achieving a balance between model complexity and generalizability is a fundamental challenge in the application of birth-death models. While more parameters promise greater accuracy and more biologically realistic models, increasing model complexity can lead to overfitting and a heavy

SUBMITTER: Stolzer M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4239551 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature