Bayesian inference of phylogenetic networks

Over the years, a number of methods have been explored for constructing evolutionary networks, starting with parsimony criteria for optimization, and moving on to likelihood-based inference. However, the development of Bayesian methods has been somewhat delayed by the computational complexities involved.

The earliest work on this topic seems to be the thesis of:

Rosalba Radice (2011) A Bayesian Approach to Phylogenetic Networks. PhD thesis, University of Bath, UK.

Apparently, the only part of this work to be published has been:

Rosalba Radice (2012) A Bayesian approach to modelling reticulation events with application to the ribosomal protein gene rps11 of flowering plants. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics 54: 401-426.

The method described requires the prior specification of the species tree (phylogeny), and the position and number of the reticulation events. The algorithm was implemented in the R language.

More recently, methods have been developed that infer phylogenies by using (i) incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) to model gene-tree incongruence arising from vertical inheritance, and (ii) introgression / hybridization to model gene-tree incongruence attributable to horizontal gene flow. ILS has been addressed using the multispecies coalescent.

The first of these publications was:

Dingqiao Wen, Yun Yu, Luay Nakhleh (2016) Bayesian inference of reticulate phylogenies under the multispecies network coalescent. PLoS Genetics 12(5): e1006006. [Correction: 2017 PLoS Genetics 13(2): e1006598]

The method requires the set of gene trees as input, along with the number of reticulations. The algorithm was implemented in the PhyloNet package.

In the past few months, two manuscripts have appeared that try to co-estimate the gene trees and the species network, using the original sequence data (assumed to be without recombination) as input:

Dingqiao Wen, Luay Nakhleh (2017) Co-estimating reticulate phylogenies and gene trees from multi-locus sequence data. bioRxiv 095539. [v.2; v.1: 2016]

Chi Zhang, Huw A Ogilvie, Alexei J Drummond, Tanja Stadler (2017) Bayesian inference of species networks from multilocus sequence data. bioRxiv 124982.

The algorithm for the first method has been implemented in the PhyloNet package, while the second has been implemented in the Beast2 package.

Finally, another manuscript describes a method utilizing data based on single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and/or amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs), which thus sidesteps the assumption of no recombination:

Jiafan Zhu, Dingqiao Wen, Yun Yu, Heidi Meudt, Luay Nakhleh (2017) Bayesian inference of phylogenetic networks from bi-allelic genetic markers. bioRxiv 143545.

This method has also been implemented in PhyloNet.

Due to the computational complexity of likelihood inference, all of these methods are currently severely restricted in the number of OTUs that can be analyzed, irrespective of whether these involve multiple samples from the same species or not. In this sense, parsimony-based inference or approximate likelihood methods are still useful for constructing evolutionary networks of any size. However, progress is clearly being made to alleviate the computational restrictions.