A cautionary note on the use of Ornstein Uhlenbeck models in macroevolutionary studies.

ABSTRACT: Phylogenetic comparative methods are increasingly used to give new insights into the dynamics of trait evolution in deep time. For continuous traits the core of these methods is a suite of models that attempt to capture evolutionary patterns by extending the Brownian constant variance model. However, the properties of these models are often poorly understood, which can lead to the misinterpretation of results. Here we focus on one of these models - the Ornstein Uhlenbeck (OU) model. We show that the OU model is frequently incorrectly favoured over simpler models when using Likelihood ratio tests, and that many studies fitting this model use datasets that are small and prone to this problem. We also show that very small amounts of error in datasets can have profound effects on the inference

SUBMITTER: Cooper N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4949538 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature