ArticlePloS one2019
Rectifying long-standing misconceptions about the ρ statistic for molecular dating.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Genetic genealogy of Y-chromosome in the Zhetiru tribe of the Kazakh population from Kazakhstan.Frontiers in genetics · 2025Article
- Mitogenomics of the Koryaks and Evens of the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk.Journal of human genetics · 2023Article
- Phylogeography of Sub-Saharan Mitochondrial Lineages Outside Africa Highlights the Roles of the Holocene Climate Changes and the Atlantic Slave Trade.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Mitogenomics of modern Mongolic-speaking populations.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2022Article
- Medieval Super-Grandfather founder of Western Kazakh Clans from Haplogroup C2a1a2-M48.Journal of human genetics · 2021Article
- Complete mitogenomes document substantial genetic contribution from the Eurasian Steppe into northern Pakistani Indo-Iranian speakers.European journal of human genetics : EJHG · 2021Article
- The Genes of Freedom: Genome-Wide Insights into Marronage, Admixture and Ethnogenesis in the Gulf of Guinea.Genes · 2021Article
- Phylogeography of 27,000 SARS-CoV-2 Genomes: Europe as the Major Source of the COVID-19 Pandemic.Microorganisms · 2020Article
- Article
- Counterbalancing the time-dependent effect on the human mitochondrial DNA molecular clock.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Evolutionary analysis of Mycobacterium bovis genotypes across Africa suggests co-evolution with livestock and humans.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
When divided by a given mutation rate, the ρ (rho) statistic provides a simple estimator of the age of a clade within a phylogenetic tree by averaging the number of mutations from each sample in the clade to its root. However, a long-standing critique of the use of ρ in genetic dating has been quite often cited. Here we show that the critique is unfounded. We demonstrate by a formal mathematical argument and illustrate with a simulation study that ρ estimates are unbiased and also that ρ and maximum likelihood estimates do not differ in any systematic fashion. We also demonstrate that the claim that the associated confidence intervals commonly estimate the uncertainty inappropriately is flawed since it relies on a means of calculating standard errors that is not used by any other researchers, whereas an established expression for the standard error is largely unproblematic. We conclude that ρ dating, alongside approaches such as maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference, remains a useful tool for genetic dating.
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