Three tree priors and five datasets: A study of the effect of tree priors in Indo-European phylogenetics
Table 4: Columns 2–4 show the 95% Highest Posterior Density (HPD) and columns 5–7 show the median ages (in years before present) of the root node from the consensus tree for each dataset and a tree prior.
['Dataset', '95% HPD FBD', '95% HPD Coalescent', '95% HPD Uniform', 'Median Age FBD', 'Median Age Coalescent', 'Median Age Uniform']
None of the reported HPD age intervals lie completely within the Steppe age interval or the Anatolian age interval. The lower bounds of HPD ages in the case of FBD and uniform priors fall within the Steppe interval, whereas the lower bound of the coalescent prior’s HPD interval falls beyond the Steppe age interval. In the case of narrow and medium datasets, the root age is further reduced to 6826 and 6845 years respectively in the case of FBD prior. The median ages inferred by FBD prior belong neither to the Steppe hypothesis interval nor to the Anatolian hypothesis interval for all the datasets. The median age inferred by uniform prior for Broad, Medium, and Narrow datasets lie within the range of the Steppe interval. All the priors infer median ages that lie beyond the Steppe interval in the case of B1 and B2 datasets. The coalescent prior infers root ages that lie within the Antolian hypothesis in the case of all the datasets except B1 dataset. Across all the priors, the median root ages decrease when the datasets are corrected for errors. The descreasing trend in the median ages is similar to the trend observed in Chang et al.