AWTY is a system for graphical exploration of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) convergence in Bayesian
phylogenetic inference. The graphics produced by AWTY are designed to help assess whether an MCMC analysis has run long enough,
such that tree topologies are being sampled in proportion to their true posterior probability distribution. In other words, "Are We There Yet?"
or AWTY for short. Admittedly, the results generated by AWTY will never be able to answer this question with a definitive yes; however,
in some cases results will point confidently to the answer no. See the AWTY image gallery for some examples.
To produce plots in AWTY a NEXUS or NEWICK formatted tree file representing a set of
trees sampled over an MCMC run is required. To date, tree files generated by
MrBayes and BAMBE have been tested. AWTY provides several graphical formats to display results or results
may also be downloaded and analyzed using the plotting package of your choice.
The online version of AWTY is written in Perl and
PHP. Posterior probabilities of splits and topological tree
distances are calculated by PAUP*. Graphics are generated by
Gnuplot.
Citation:
Wilgenbusch J.C., Warren D.L., Swofford D.L. 2004. AWTY: A system for graphical exploration of MCMC
convergence in Bayesian phylogenetic inference. http://ceb.csit.fsu.edu/awty.