phylotastic / phylotastic-portal

Web tool (ruby on rails) providing access to phylotastic services for acquiring species trees.
https://github.com/phylotastic/phylotastic/wiki
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spot-check of scaling accuracy #316

Closed arlin closed 6 years ago

arlin commented 6 years ago

The dev portal currently allows median-scaled trees from DateLife. These are shown with a scalebar in millions of years. We haven't tested yet whether these values are correct. They might be mistaken if there are mistakes in the code.

Pick a case such as felidae for which we know the dates expected from DateLife resources, and use this to test whether the dev portal is representing dates accurately for a median scaled tree.

Another way to test is to use TimeTree. Download a list from the portal, upload it in TimeTree, which accepts the one-name-per-line format.

arlin commented 6 years ago

I'm checking this using the desert plants list. Note that TimeTree cannot find about 12 of the species out of 15, so I can't use TimeTree to check this. Waiting for feedback from @LunaSare

arlin commented 6 years ago

Cat family. Start with Stephen J O'Brien paper in Sci. American. http://www.bio-nica.info/biblioteca/O'brien2007EvolutionCats.pdf. Screen Shot 2018-07-06 at 4.05.14 PM.png

arlin commented 6 years ago

OK, I have now done a comparative analysis of scaling for Felidae. The results are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/lx7xf0bdw1z88ah/AAC7hJoVjnDAGpskuxJ5S9Ica?dl=0

felidae_scaling.png

LunaSare commented 6 years ago

I finished trying both felidae and desert plants examples and some others from the lists available on phylotastic portal. median and sdm trees displayed on the portal come from using a tree as input. When using names as input, results are different. That's why my tests and the portal trees were different. Please see issue https://github.com/phylotastic/phylotastic-portal/issues/322

arlin commented 6 years ago

Our analysis of this yesterday and today is that the Felidae results are acceptable given that there is disagreement among the published chronograms, and disagreement among scientists. We just need to do some things to notify the user about this: see phylotastic/phylotastic-portal#323