Predicting the depth of the most recent common ancestor of a random sample of $k$ species: the impact of phylogenetic tree shape

Abstract

We consider the following question: how close to the ancestral root of a phylogenetic tree is the most recent common ancestor of $k$ species randomly sampled from the tips of the tree? For trees having shapes predicted by the Yule-Harding model, it is known that the most recent common ancestor is likely to be close to (or equal to) the root of the full tree, even as $n$ becomes large (for $k$ fixed). However, this result does not extend to models of tree shape that more closely describe phylogenies encountered in evolutionary biology. We investigate the impact of tree shape (via the Aldous $\beta-$splitting model) to predict the number of edges that separate the most recent common ancestor of a random sample of $k$ tip species and the root of the parent tree they are sampled from. Both exact and asymptotic results are presented. We also briefly consider a variation of the process in which a random number of tip species are sampled.