Defence of model-based inference

A tribune—to which I contributed—about the virtues of statistical inference in phylogeography  just appeared in Molecular Ecology. (The whole paper seems to be available on line as I can access it.) It has been written by 22 (!) contributors in response to Templeton’s recent criticism of ABC (and his defence of Nested Clade Analysis) in the same journal. My contribution to the paper is mostly based on the arguments posted here last March, namely that the paper was confusing ABC (which is a computational method) with Bayesian statistics. The paper as a whole goes beyond a “Bayesian defence” since not all authors are Bayesian. It supports a statistics based approach to phyleogeography, as reported in the abstract

Recent papers have promoted the view that model-based methods in general, and those based on Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) in particular, are flawed in a number of ways, and are therefore inappropriate for the analysis of phylogeographic data. These papers further argue that Nested Clade Phylogeographic Analysis (NCPA) offers the best approach in statistical phylogeography. In order to remove the confusion and misconceptions introduced by these papers, we justify and explain the reasoning behind model-based inference. We argue that ABC is a statistically valid approach, alongside other computational statistical techniques that have been successfully used to infer parameters and compare models in population genetics. We also examine the NCPA method and highlight numerous deficiencies, either when used with single or multiple loci. We further show that the ages of clades are carelessly used to infer ages of demographic events, that these ages are estimated under a simple model of panmixia and population stationarity but are then used under different and unspecified models to test hypotheses, a usage the invalidates these testing procedures. We conclude by encouraging researchers to study and use model-based inference in population genetics.

This will most presumably fail to end the debate between the proponents and the opponents of model-based inference in phylogenics and elsewhere, but the point was worth making…