2014/08/21 by Krzysztof Bartoszek, Serik Sagitov · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Earth and Planetary Sciences · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Biology #Estimator #Evolution and Genetic Dynamics #Evolution and Paleontology Studies #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Evolutionary biology #Genetics #Mathematics #Phylogenetics #Rate of evolution #Statistics #math.PR #q-bio.PE #q-bio.QM #stat.AP
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.01.019
published as Journal of Theoretical Biology 371:69-78, 2015
arxiv created 2014/08/21 · openalex publication_date 2015/01/27 · arxiv updated 2020/11/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We consider a branching particle system where particles reproduce according to the pure birth Yule process with the birth rate L, conditioned on the observed number of particles to be equal n. Particles are assumed to move independently on the real line according to the Brownian motion with the local variance s2. In this paper we treat n particles as a sample of related species. The spatial Brownian motion of a particle describes the development of a trait value of interest (e.g. log-body-size). We propose an unbiased estimator Rn2 of the evolutionary rate r2=s2/L. The estimator Rn2 is proportional to the sample variance Sn2 computed from n trait values. We find an approximate formula for the standard error of Rn2 based on a neat asymptotic relation for the variance of Sn2.