Data from: Taxon Influence Index: assessing taxon-induced incongruities in phylogenetic inference

Understanding the evolutionary history of species is at the core of
molecular evolution and is done using several inference methods. The
critical issue is to quantify the uncertainty of the inference. The
posterior probabilities in Bayesian phylogenetic inference and the
bootstrap values in frequentist approaches measure the variability of the
estimates due to the sampling of sites from genes and the sampling of
genes from genomes. However, they do not measure the uncertainty due to
taxon sampling. Taxa that experienced molecular homoplasy, recent
selection, a spur of evolution and so forth may disrupt the inference and
cause incongruences in the estimated phylogeny. We define a Taxon
Influence Index to assess the influence of each taxon on the phylogeny. We
found that although most taxa have a weak influence on the phylogeny, a
small fraction of influential taxa strongly alter it, even in clades only
loosely related to them. We conclude that highly influential taxa should
be given special attention and sampling them more thoroughly can lead to
more dependable phylogenies.