[R-sig-phylo] Best way to summarize a tree balance statistic over a posterior tree distribution?

Hi all, What's the best way to summarise a tree balance statistic (e.g. Colless Ic, or Fusco and Cronk's Iw) over a posterior tree distribution? I'm a bit concerned that running e.g. apTreeshape's colless.test or caper's fusco.test on, say, 1000 trees will give me a massive false positive

Re: [R-sig-phylo] Best way to summarize a tree balance statistic over a posterior tree distribution?

Hi Simon, Slightly off the top of my head, but I'd use the distribution of I' over the 1000 trees and test if it is different from the expectation of 0.5. That ignores the variation in the expectation, so simulate 1000 random trees of the same number of tips, and then do a t.test to compare

Re: [R-sig-phylo] Best way to summarize a tree balance statistic over a posterior tree distribution?

My admittedly biased advice would be to use the beta-splitting statistic. The statistic is available in the apTreeshape package. What is nice with this statistic is that its value should be interpretable whatever the sizes of the trees you are looking at. Beta=0 is the yule model, beta=-3/2