🐙🐁 BEASTIARY 🐁🐙

Introducing Beastiary, a package designed for visualising and analysing MCMC trace files generated from Bayesian phylogenetic analyses.

Applications for performing Bayesian phylogenetic analyses typical sample for the posterior distribution sequentially. One of the big hurdles with using these applications is knowing when to stop sampling. Typically research will run an analysis and look at the samples after their analysis is completed to see if they have collected enough samples. However, these samples are collected in real-time, which leaves open the opportunity for real-time analysis. On top of this analyses are commonly run on remote servers e.g. a HPC.

Beastiary is essentially a data visualisation web-app, it watches the log files generated by Bayesian phylogenetic software and updates plots in real-time. This enables researchers to determine if they have enough samples before their analysis has completed. Because it is a webapp is can easily be deployed to remote servers like a HPC.

Check out our paper: Wytamma Wirth, Sebastian Duchene, Real-Time and Remote MCMC Trace Inspection with Beastiary, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 39, Issue 5, May 2022, msac095, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msac095