Fig. 5

Effect of filtering. We investigated the effect of filtering by q threshold on the accuracy of \(t_{\text {MRS}}\) estimates using simulation dataset. The x-axis represents the fraction of alignment columns remained by filtering with varying threshold. a Fraction of alignment columns that have no mutation throughout the target lineage in the positive set. b Mean % error of \(t_{\text {MRS}}\) values in the dataset after filtering. The blue and green points represent the approximate \(t_{\text {MRS}}\) and q computed from the reconstruction of ancestral states, and the closest extant species whose base is different from that of the target species, respectively