title: Comment on "Statistical binning enables an accurate coalescent-based estimation of the avian tree".
abstract: Mirarab et al. (Research Article, 12 December 2014, p. 1250463) introduced statistical binning to improve the signal in phylogenetic methods using the multispecies coalescent model. We show that all forms of binning-naïve, statistical, and weighted statistical-display poor performance and are statistically inconsistent in large regions of parameter space, unlike unbinned sequence data used with species tree methods.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. sedwards@fas.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Scott V
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: Edwards
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D016678:Genome; D010802:Phylogeny