Hi Szymon.

I don't know about BayesTraits; however it is possible to do marginal ancestral state reconstruction using multiple functions in R (e.g., ee my blog: http://blog.phytools.org/2013/03/marginal-ancestral-state-reconstruction.html). If the same model is used, these different approaches should give the same probabilities at internal nodes. However, a word of caution. With such a very large tree, it's possible that different implementations of the same method may give different results simply for having failed to converge to the MLEs.

All the best, Liam

Liam J. Revell, Assistant Professor of Biology
University of Massachusetts Boston
web: http://faculty.umb.edu/liam.revell/
email: liam.rev...@umb.edu
blog: http://blog.phytools.org

On 12/6/2013 1:10 PM, Szymek Drobniak wrote:
Hello, thank you Liam for your quick answer, I might have phrased my
question not very clearly. The point is that both simmap and
rerootingMethod (using bort EM and SYM) give almost identical results
(there are some slight differences which is obvious but the overall
picture - and the root ancestral state - are the same). I was wondering
why BayesTraits (which, at least in theory, uses similar approach) gives
different result than phytools - in BayesTraits the transition rates are
entirely different, and the ancestral state of the root is different. I
was wondering that maybe somebody had more experience with BayesTraits
and came across this difference between BayesTraits and some other
packages. As for the BT analysis - I used both ML and MCMC methods, in
the latter I used a flat exponential hyperprior. For the time being I
used a consensus tree rather than a sample from the distribution of trees.

Cheers
sz.


On 6 December 2013 16:58, Liam J. Revell <liam.rev...@umb.edu
<mailto:liam.rev...@umb.edu>> wrote:

    Hi Szymon.

    Can you give us some more details on the analyses that you ran?
    Marginal ancestral states (from rerootingMethod) and posterior
    frequencies (from make.simmap, using describe.simmap to summarize
    the results across stochastic maps) tend to be very highly
    correlated (although they should not expected to be exactly the same
    as give marginal ancestral states and the other samples sets of
    states from their joint probability distribution). There are several
    possible reasons why ancestral states might be different. For
    instance, the default substitution model in rerootingMethod is "ER"
    (equal-rates) whereas the default model in make.simmap is "SYM"
    (symmetrical rates). In addition, the methods can use different
    prior probabilities for the root. By default, both functions use a
    flat prior; however make.simmap can also use the stationary
    distribution given the transition matrix Q, or an arbitrary prior.
    Finally, make.simmap can use the MLE of Q, an arbitrary value of Q,
    or sample Q from its posterior probability distribution conditioned
    on a model. All of these different options could potentially result
    in different ancestral reconstructions.

    All the best, Liam

    Liam J. Revell, Assistant Professor of Biology
    University of Massachusetts Boston
    web: http://faculty.umb.edu/liam.__revell/
    <http://faculty.umb.edu/liam.revell/>
    email: liam.rev...@umb.edu <mailto:liam.rev...@umb.edu>
    blog: http://blog.phytools.org


    On 12/6/2013 9:17 AM, Szymek Drobniak wrote:

        Hello all,

        I'm trying to reconstruct ancestral states in a 3-state trait
        evolving on a
        big (>2000 tips) phylogeny. I've tried both BayesTraits and
        tools from Liam
        Revell's phytools (continuous time Markov model and stochastic
        mapping)
        package. Surprisingly (or maybe not?) both give different answers,
        especially with respect to the ancestral states of deep nodes
        (including
        root node) and transition rates. Is it something I should expect
        - do
        anyone have some idea why these are so different?

        Cheers
        szymon



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*
*Dr Szymon Drobniak*
Anthropological Institute and Museum
Office Y42-K-66
University of Zürich - Irchel
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CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland

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