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Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices

Assessing the importance of different taxa for inferring evolutionary history is a critical, but underutilized, aspect of systematics. Quantifying the importance of all taxa within a dataset provides an empirical measurement that can establish a ranking of extant taxa for ecological study and/or qua...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Denton, John S. S., Goolsby, Eric W.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5938459/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29760889
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3941
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author Denton, John S. S.
Goolsby, Eric W.
author_facet Denton, John S. S.
Goolsby, Eric W.
author_sort Denton, John S. S.
collection PubMed
description Assessing the importance of different taxa for inferring evolutionary history is a critical, but underutilized, aspect of systematics. Quantifying the importance of all taxa within a dataset provides an empirical measurement that can establish a ranking of extant taxa for ecological study and/or quantify the relative importance of newly announced or redescribed specimens to enable the disentangling of novelty and inferential influence. Here, we illustrate the use of taxon influence indices through analysis of both molecular and morphological datasets, introducing a modified Bayesian approach to the taxon influence index that accounts for model and topological uncertainty. Quantification of taxon influence using the Bayesian approach produced clear rankings for both dataset types. Bayesian taxon rankings differed from maximum likelihood (ML)‐derived rankings from a mitogenomic dataset, and the highest ranking taxa exhibited the largest interquartile range in influence estimate, suggesting variance in the estimate must be taken into account when the ranking of taxa is the feature of interest. Application of the Bayesian taxon influence index to a recent morphological analysis of the Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum) reveals that it exhibits consistently low inferential importance across two recent treatments of the taxon with alternative character codings. These results lend support to the idea that taxon influence indices may be robust to character coding and therefore effective for morphological analyses. These results underscore a need for the development of approaches to, and application of, taxon influence analyses both for the purpose of establishing robust rankings for future inquiry and for explicitly quantifying the importance of individual taxa. Quantifying the importance of individual taxa refocuses debates in morphological studies from questions of character choice/significance and taxon sampling to explicitly analytical techniques, and guides discussion of the context of new discoveries.
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spelling pubmed-59384592018-05-14 Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices Denton, John S. S. Goolsby, Eric W. Ecol Evol Original Research Assessing the importance of different taxa for inferring evolutionary history is a critical, but underutilized, aspect of systematics. Quantifying the importance of all taxa within a dataset provides an empirical measurement that can establish a ranking of extant taxa for ecological study and/or quantify the relative importance of newly announced or redescribed specimens to enable the disentangling of novelty and inferential influence. Here, we illustrate the use of taxon influence indices through analysis of both molecular and morphological datasets, introducing a modified Bayesian approach to the taxon influence index that accounts for model and topological uncertainty. Quantification of taxon influence using the Bayesian approach produced clear rankings for both dataset types. Bayesian taxon rankings differed from maximum likelihood (ML)‐derived rankings from a mitogenomic dataset, and the highest ranking taxa exhibited the largest interquartile range in influence estimate, suggesting variance in the estimate must be taken into account when the ranking of taxa is the feature of interest. Application of the Bayesian taxon influence index to a recent morphological analysis of the Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum) reveals that it exhibits consistently low inferential importance across two recent treatments of the taxon with alternative character codings. These results lend support to the idea that taxon influence indices may be robust to character coding and therefore effective for morphological analyses. These results underscore a need for the development of approaches to, and application of, taxon influence analyses both for the purpose of establishing robust rankings for future inquiry and for explicitly quantifying the importance of individual taxa. Quantifying the importance of individual taxa refocuses debates in morphological studies from questions of character choice/significance and taxon sampling to explicitly analytical techniques, and guides discussion of the context of new discoveries. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2018-04-03 /pmc/articles/PMC5938459/ /pubmed/29760889 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3941 Text en © 2018 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Research
Denton, John S. S.
Goolsby, Eric W.
Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title_full Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title_fullStr Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title_full_unstemmed Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title_short Measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
title_sort measuring inferential importance of taxa using taxon influence indices
topic Original Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5938459/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29760889
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3941
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