New paper on informed priors out in Systematic Biology

The Phyleaux Lab has a new paper available via Advance Access in Systematic Biology. This paper was spearheaded by Brad Nelson and explores the use of existing information (contained in other sequence datasets) to set informed branch-length priors for Bayesian phylogenetic analyses. The approach seems promising for branch lengths and may be applicable to other parameters in phylogenetic models. If interested, you can find the paper here:

Nelson, B.J., J.J. Andersen, and J.M. Brown. (2015) Deflating trees: Improving Bayesian branch-length estimates using informed priors. Systematic Biology. In Press.

We've also written software (EmpPrior) to help find relevant datasets in TreeBase and use them to estimate parameters for relevant branch-length distributions. EmpPrior can be found here:

https://code.google.com/p/empprior/