Bayesian phylogeny analysis via stochastic approximation Monte Carlo.
Monte Carlo methods have received much attention in the recent literature of phylogeny analysis. However, the conventional Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, such as the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, tend to get trapped in a local mode in simulating from the posterior distribution of phylogenetic trees, rendering the inference ineffective. In this paper, we apply an advanced Monte Carlo algorithm, the stochastic approximation Monte Carlo algorithm, to Bayesian phylogeny analysis. Our method is compared with two popular Bayesian phylogeny software, BAMBE and MrBayes, on simulated and real datasets. The numerical results indicate that our method outperforms BAMBE and MrBayes. Among the three methods, SAMC produces the consensus trees which have the highest similarity to the true trees, and the model parameter estimates which have the smallest mean square errors, but costs the least CPU time.
Cheon
Sooyoung
S
KU Industry-Academy Cooperation Group Team of Economics and Statistics, Korea University, Jochiwon, South Korea. stat-csy@hanmail.net
Liang
Faming
F
D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D003198:Computer Simulation; D008957:Models, Genetic; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D010802:Phylogeny; D013269:Stochastic Processes