Accurate Model Selection of Relaxed Molecular Clocks in Bayesian Phylogenetics

Recent implementations of path sampling (PS) and stepping-stone sampling (SS) have been shown to outperform the harmonic mean estimator (HME) and a posterior simulation-based analog of Akaike's information criterion through Markov chain Monte Carlo (AICM), in bayesian model selection of demographic and molecular clock models. Almost simultaneously, a bayesian model averaging approach was developed that avoids conditioning on a single model but averages over a set of relaxed clock models. This approach returns estimates of the posterior probability of each clock model through which one can estimate the Bayes factor in favor of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) clock model; however, this Bayes factor estimate may…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• EC
  European Commission
• UG
  Universiteit Gent
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• DO
  Division of Mathematical Sciences