Ancestral Inference from Functional Data: Statistical Methods and Numerical Examples
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Many biological characteristics of evolutionary interest are not scalar variables but continuous functions. Here we use phylogenetic Gaussian process regression to model the evolution of simulated function-valued traits. Given function-valued data only from the tips of an evolutionary tree and utilising independent principal component analysis (IPCA) as a method for dimension reduction, we construct distributional estimates of ancestral function-valued traits, and estimate parameters describing their evolutionary dynamics.
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