R help - Apr 2019 - new R packages for phylogenetic compartive methods

Dear all,
I wanted to let you know about four phylogenetic comparative methods (PCM)
packages that have become available on (3 on CRAN and 1 on GitHub) recently that
hopefully will be interesting to somebody. Three of them go significantly beyond
the Brownian motion (BM) and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) processes.

1) There is a new version of mvSLOUCH available. The most important change is
that
the inference engine has been completely rewritten. Instead of directly
evaluating the multivariate normal density formula it uses the PCMBase (R
package, see below) to obtain the value of the likelihood in linear (in number
of tip species) instead of quadratic time. Furthermore, as there is no need to
store the between-species-between-traits variance covariance matrix much larger
clades, then previously can be handled. From the user's perspective the main
changes are the interface and increased functionality:
a) the phylogeny has to be now in the phylo (instead of ouch) format,
b) the trait data has to be a matrix (and not a data frame),
c) the package can automatically compare multiple models (BM, OUOU, OUBM and
different assumed structures on the drift and diffusion matrices of the
multivariate OU procees), function  estimate.evolutionary.model(), and return
the one with the lowest AICc (the set of models to consider can either be
automatically generated or user defined, see generate.model.setups()),
d) the user can set entries of the OU model's parameters to desired values
(e.g. 0) and this will be fixed through the whole estimation,
e) a number of control parameters to be passed to the estimation procedure and
optim() are available for the user to manipulate

2) PCMFit: the goal of PCMFit is to provide a generic tool for inference and
selection of phylogenetic comparative models (PCMs). Currently, the package
implements Gaussian and mixed Gaussian phylogenetic models (MGPM) over all tree
types (including non-ultrametric and polytomic trees). The package supports
non-existing traits or missing measurements for some of the traits on some of
the species. The package supports specifying measurement error associated with
each tip of the tree or inferring a measurement error parameter for a group of
tips. The Gaussian phylogenetic models include various parametrizations of
Brownian motion (BM) and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) multivariate branching
processes. The mixed Gaussian models represent models with shifts in the model
parameters as well as the type of model at points of the tree. Each shift-point
is described as a pair of a shift-node and associated type of model (e.g. OU or
BM) driving the trait evolution from the beginning of the branch le
 ading to the shift-node toward the shift-node and its descendants until
reaching a tip or another shift-point. The function PCMFit is used to fit a
given PCM or a MGPM for a given tree with specified shift-points. The function
PCMFitMixed is used to fit an ensemble of possible MGPMs over a tree for which
the shift-points are unknown. This function can perform model selection of the
best MGPM for a given tree and data according to an information loss function
such as the Akaike information criterion (AIC). The package has been thoroughly
tested and applied to real data in the related research article entitled
"Automatic Generation of Evolutionary Hypotheses using Mixed Gaussian
Phylogenetic Models" (currently in review). Currently, the package is
available from https://github.com/venelin/PCMFit . The web-page
https://venelin.github.io/PCMFit/ provides access to documentation and related
resources.

3) PCMBase: the computational engine that mvSLOUCH uses. Given a phylogeny
(phylo format), traits' (multivariate) measurements and a user provided
model of the traits' evolution the package calculates the likelihood. The
family of allowed models is rather general. The package can handle any model for
which lineages after speciation do not interact and the density of the
transition along a branch is:
i) Gaussian
ii) the mean at the end of the branch depends linearly on the trait value at the
start of the branch
iii) the covariance matrix does not depend on the value at the start of the
branch
The likelihood is calculated in linear in number of tip species time.
The package is described in
Venelin Mitov, Krzysztof Bartoszek, Georgios Asimomitis, Tanja Stadler (2018).
Fast likelihood evaluation for multivariate phylogenetic comparative methods:
the PCMBase R package
arXiv URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09014 .

3) pcmabc: a package that allows for simulation and ABC estimation under any
model for which the user can provide a function to simulate trait
(discrete/continuous, uni- or multivariate) evolution along a branch. Special
support is given for SDE based models, using the yuima package.
Krzysztof Bartoszek, Pietro Lio' (2019) Modelling trait dependent speciation
with Approximate Bayesian Computation. Acta Physica Polonica B Proceedings
Supplement 12(1): 25-47.
URL https://www.actaphys.uj.edu.pl/fulltext?series=Sup&vol=12&page=25 .

Hope somebody will find these useful

Best wishes
Krzysztof Bartoszek

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