treestructure applied to structured coalescent simulation

Erik Volz

2020-02-06

treestructure

Citation

Identification of hidden population structure in time-scaled phylogenies

Erik Volz, Carsten Wiuf, Yonatan Grad, Simon Frost, Ann Dennis, Xavier Didelot, bioRxiv 704528; https://doi.org/10.1101/704528

Structured coalescent simulation

This example shows trestruct applied to a simulated structured coalescent tree that includes samples from a large constant size population and samples from three small ‘outbreaks’ which are growing exponentially. These simulations were generated with the phydynR package.

Load the tree:

Note that the tip labels corresponds to the deme of each sample. ‘1’ is the constant size reservoir, and ‘0’ is the exponentially growing deme.

This will run the treestructure algorithm under default setting:

You can print the results:

The default plotting behavior uses the ggtree package if available.

If not, or if desired, ape plots are available

For subsequent analysis, you may want to turn the treestructure result into a dataframe:

Each cluster and partition assignment is stored as a factor. You could use split to get a data frame for each partition. Suppose we want a tree corresponding to partition 1:

Two parameters will have large influence on results:

  1. level is the significance level for subdividing a clade into a new cluster. To detect more clusters, increase p, but note that this will also increase the false positive rate.
  2. minCladeSize controls the smallest allowed cluster size in terms of the number of tips. With a smaller value, smaller clusters may be detected, but computation time will increase.

Example: