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MBE Advance Access published online on February 13, 2007
Molecular Biology and Evolution, doi:10.1093/molbev/msm028
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Research Article

The Bayesian ‘Star Paradox’ Persists for Long Finite Sequences

Mike Steel and Frederick A. Matsen

Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution

Corresponding author: Mike Steel, Biomathematics Research Centre, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand, Phone: +64-3-364-2987 ext. 7688, Fax: +64-3-364-2587, Email: M.Steel{at}math.canterbury.ac.nz

Accepted for publication January 31, 2007.

The ‘star paradox’ in phylogenetics is the tendency for a particular resolved tree to be sometimes strongly supported even when the data is generated by an unresolved (‘star’) tree. There have been contrary claims as to whether this phenomenon persists when very long sequences are considered. This note settles one aspect of this debate by proving mathematically that the chance that a resolved tree could be strongly supported stays above some strictly positive number, even as the length of the sequences becomes very large.

Key Words: phylogenetic trees • Bayesian statistics • star trees


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