This work develops a methodology for eliciting expert knowledge on phylogenies focusing on a rooted tree. It is motivated by the necessity of incorporating the expert knowledge such as that obtained from morphology, fossil studies, etc. with molecular data in Bayesian inference of phylogenies. Expert opinion on phylogenies is elicited by asking an expert to introduce species one by one. Probability distributions are obtained on both tree topologies and branch lengths.
Evaluation work is done by separately evaluating elicitation on branch length and on topology. The use of the methodology, technique and software is demonstrated through six case studies on various species.
|