bModelTest: Bayesian phylogenetic site model averaging and model comparison

By Remco R. Bouckaert, Alexei J. Drummond. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 2015

774 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reconstructing phylogenies through Bayesian methods has many benefits, which include providing a mathematically sound framework, providing realistic estimates of uncertainty and being able to incorporate different sources of information based on formal principles. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses are popular for interpreting nucleotide sequence data, however for such studies one needs to specify a site model and associated substitution model. Often, the parameters of the site model is of no interest and an ad-hoc or additional likelihood based analysis is used to select a single site model. bModelTest allows for a Bayesian approach to inferring and marginalizing site models in a phylogenetic analysis. It is based on trans-dimensional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposals that allow switching between substitution models as well as estimating the posterior probability for gamma-distributed rate heterogeneity, a proportion of invariable sites and unequal base frequencies. The model can be used with the full set of time-reversible models on nucleotides, but we also introduce and demonstrate the use of two subsets of time-reversible substitution models. With the new method the site model can be inferred (and marginalized) during the MCMC analysis and does not need to be pre-determined, as is now often the case in practice, by likelihood-based methods. The method is implemented in the bModelTest package of the popular BEAST 2 software, which is open source, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and allows joint site model and tree inference under a wide range of models.

Subfields: Anthropology, Molecular Biology, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4f3bae9669a63023193ab9fdaf96d3f2f8e9132

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Citations in the corpus

The evolutionary dynamics of endemic human coronaviruses (2021, methodology): “Bayesian model averaging was used to infer the most appropriate substitution model for the HCoV-OC43 S gene dataset via the bModelTest package (Bouckaert and Drummond 2017), implemented in Beast2.”
High-level classification of the Fungi and a tool for evolutionary ecological analyses (2018, methodology): “The substitution model was inferred together with the phylogeny by using the BEAST 2 package bModelTest (Bouckaert and Drummond 2017).”