Revisiting phylogenetic signal; strong or negligible impacts of polytomies and branch length information?

backgroundInaccurate estimates of phylogenetic signal may mislead interpretations of many ecological and evolutionary processes, and hence understanding where potential sources of uncertainty may lay has become a priority for comparative studies. Importantly, the sensitivity of phylogenetic signal indices and their associated statistical tests to incompletely resolved phylogenies and suboptimal branch-length information has been only partially investigated.

methodsHere, we use simulations of trait evolution along phylogenetic trees to assess whether incompletely resolved phylogenies (polytomic chronograms) and phylogenies with suboptimal branch-length information (pseudo-chronograms) could produce directional biases in significance tests (p-values) associated with Blomberg et al.'s K and Pagel's lambda (λ) statistics, two of the most widely used indices to measure and test phylogenetic signal. Specifically, we conducted pairwise comparisons between the p-values resulted from the use of "true" chronograms and their degraded counterparts (i.e. polytomic chronograms and pseudo-chronograms), and computed the frequency with which the null hypothesis of no phylogenetic signal was accepted using "true" chronograms but rejected when using their degraded counterparts (type I bias) and vice versa (type II bias).

resultsWe found that the use of polytomic chronograms in combination with Blomberg et al.'s K resulted in both, clearly inflated estimates of phylogenetic signal and moderate levels of type I and II biases. More importantly, pseudo-chronograms led to high rates of type I biases. In contrast, Pagel's λ was strongly robust to either incompletely resolved phylogenies and suboptimal branch-length information.

conclusionsOur results suggest that pseudo-chronograms can lead to strong overestimation of phylogenetic signal when using Blomberg et al.'s K (i.e. high rates of type I biases), while polytomies may be a minor concern given other sources of uncertainty. In contrast, Pagel's λ seems strongly robust to either incompletely resolved phylogenies and suboptimal branch-length information. Hence, Pagel's λ may be a more appropriate alternative over Blomberg et al.'s K to measure and test phylogenetic signal in most ecologically relevant traits when phylogenetic information is incomplete.