Effect of missing data on topological inference using a total evidence approach

We investigate three major factors that directly affect the completeness and the size of the morphological part of the matrix: the proportion of living taxa with no morphological data, the amount of missing data in the fossil record, and the overall number of morphological characters in the matrix. We infer phylogenies from complete matrices and from matrices with various amounts of missing data, and then compare missing data topologies to the "best" tree topology inferred using the complete matrix.

We find that the number of living taxa with morphological characters and the overall number of morphological characters in the matrix, are more important than the amount of missing data in the fossil record for recovering the "best" tree topology. Therefore, we suggest that sampling effort should be focused on morphological data collection for living species to increase the accuracy of topological inference in a Total Evidence framework.

Additionally, we find that Bayesian methods consistently outperform other tree inference methods. We therefore recommend using Bayesian consensus trees to fix the tree topology prior to further analyses.