Publications by authors named "Max R Tolkoff"
Article Synopsis
- Biological phenotypes arise from complex evolutionary processes influenced by selective forces on multiple traits, and phylogenetic comparative methods aim to analyze these intricate relationships.
- Current methods struggle to handle high-dimensional data with many observations, making phylogenetic factor analysis a promising solution for dimensionality challenges but complicated by numerous modeling decisions.
- The authors propose new techniques to improve computational efficiency and flexibility in phylogenetic factor analysis, offering a practical analysis plan and automated pipeline to simplify modeling choices, illustrated by real-world examples across various biological studies.
Comparative biologists are often interested in inferring covariation between multiple biological traits sampled across numerous related taxa. To properly study these relationships, we must control for the shared evolutionary history of the taxa to avoid spurious inference. An additional challenge arises as obtaining a full suite of measurements becomes increasingly difficult with increasing taxa.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that generates model residuals or the traits themselves. For high-dimensional traits, inferring all pair-wise correlations within the multivariate diffusion is limiting.
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