A likelihood approach to character weighting and what it tells us about parsimony and compatibility

Abstract

The statistical framework of maximum likelihood estimation is used to examine character weighting in inferring phylogenies. A simple probabilistic model of evolution is used, in which each character evolves independently among two states, and different lineages evolve independently. When different characters have different known probabilities of change, all sufficiently small, the proper maximum likelihood method of estimating phylogenies is a weighted parsimony method in which the weights are logarithmically related to the rates of change. When rates of change are taken extremely small, the weights become more equal and unweighted parsimony methods are obtained. When it is known that a few characters have very high rates of change and the rest very low rates, but it is not known which characters are the ones having the high rates, the maximum likelihood criterion supports use of compatibility methods. By varying the fraction of characters believed to have high rates of change one obtains a ‘threshold method’ whose behavior depends on the value of a parameter. By altering this parameter the method changes smoothly from being a parsimony method to being a compatibility method. This provides us with a spectrum of intermediates between these methods. These intermediate methods may be of use in analysing real data.