Statistical hypothesis testing in intraspecific phylogeography: nested clade phylogeographical analysis vs. approximate Bayesian computation - PubMed (original) (raw)

Comparative Study

Statistical hypothesis testing in intraspecific phylogeography: nested clade phylogeographical analysis vs. approximate Bayesian computation

Alan R Templeton. Mol Ecol. 2009 Jan.

Abstract

Nested clade phylogeographical analysis (NCPA) and approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) have been used to test phylogeographical hypotheses. Multilocus NCPA tests null hypotheses, whereas ABC discriminates among a finite set of alternatives. The interpretive criteria of NCPA are explicit and allow complex models to be built from simple components. The interpretive criteria of ABC are ad hoc and require the specification of a complete phylogeographical model. The conclusions from ABC are often influenced by implicit assumptions arising from the many parameters needed to specify a complex model. These complex models confound many assumptions so that biological interpretations are difficult. Sampling error is accounted for in NCPA, but ABC ignores important sources of sampling error that creates pseudo-statistical power. NCPA generates the full sampling distribution of its statistics, but ABC only yields local probabilities, which in turn make it impossible to distinguish between a good fitting model, a non-informative model, and an over-determined model. Both NCPA and ABC use approximations, but convergences of the approximations used in NCPA are well defined whereas those in ABC are not. NCPA can analyse a large number of locations, but ABC cannot. Finally, the dimensionality of tested hypothesis is known in NCPA, but not for ABC. As a consequence, the 'probabilities' generated by ABC are not true probabilities and are statistically non-interpretable. Accordingly, ABC should not be used for hypothesis testing, but simulation approaches are valuable when used in conjunction with NCPA or other methods that do not rely on highly parameterized models.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Five haplotype trees estimated from samples of African savanna elephants (black), African forest elephants (grey), and Asian elephants as an outgroup (white circles) by Roca et al. (2005). A black arrow shows the points in the haplotype trees at which a significant fragmentation event was inferred by NCPA that primarily separates the forested and savanna areas of Africa.

Figure 2

Figure 2

A diagram of the sampling considerations made explicit by Ewens (1983) for long-term statistics (Slt) and current generation statistics (Scg). A contrast of these two types of statistics will focus its power on the evolutionary model used to generate the long-term statistic only if both types of statistics include the impact of sampling error from the current generation.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Hypothetical posterior distributions for three models for a univariate statistic and an area around the observed value of statistic where local probabilities are evaluated.

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