Three tree priors and five datasets: A study of the effect of tree priors in Indo-European phylogenetics
Table 5: AICM values for each of the datasets. The lower the value the better is the model’s fit to the data. The best fitting model’s AICM value is shown in bold and is computed using tracer (Rambaut et al., 2013).
['Tree Prior', 'B1', 'B2', 'broad', 'medium', 'narrow']
The results show that the Uniform tree prior fits the best for B1, Broad, and narrow datasets. The difference between AICM values of Uniform and FBD priors is almost negligible in the case of Broad and narrow datasets. The coalescent prior shows the highest AICM value and differs by a large margin when compared with FBD and Uniform priors. Since uniform tree prior has fewer parameters than FBD prior, I suggest that any future phylogenetic experiment should test uniform tree prior as a baseline before testing more parameter-rich priors such as FBD or Coalescent priors.