anc.ML: Ancestral character estimation using likelihood
Description
This function estimates the evolutionary parameters and ancestral states for Brownian evolution using likelihood. It is also possible (for model="BM") to allow for missing data for some tip taxa.
a vector of tip values for species; names(x) should be the species names.
maxit
an optional integer value indicating the maximum number of iterations for optimization.
model
model of continuous character evolution ont he tree. It's possible that only model="BM" works in the present version as model="OU" has not be thoroughly tested & some bugs were reported for an earlier version.
...
other arguments.
Value
A list with the following components:
sig2the variance of the BM process.
acea vector with the ancestral states.
logLikthe log-likelihood.
convergencethe value of $convergence returned by optim() (0 is good).
Details
Because this function relies on a high dimensional numerical optimization of the likelihood function, fastAnc should probably be preferred for most purposes. If using anc.ML, users should be cautious to ensure convergence. This has been ameliorated in phytools>=0.2-48 by seeding the ML optimization with the result from fastAnc.
References
Revell, L. J. (2012) phytools: An R package for phylogenetic comparative biology (and other things). Methods Ecol. Evol., 3, 217-223.
Schluter, D., Price, T., Mooers, A. O., and Ludwig, D. (1997) Likelihood of ancestor states in adaptive radiation. Evolution51, 1699-1711.