Inferring the evolutionary model of community-structuring traits with convolutional kitchen sinks: Code and data

<b>Abstract</b><br/><p>When communities are assembled through processes such as filtering or limiting similarity acting on phylogenetically conserved traits, the evolutionary signature of those traits may be reflected in patterns of community membership. We show how the model of trait evolution underlying community-structuring traits can be inferred from community membership data using both a variation of a traditional eco-phylogenetic metric--the mean pairwise distance (MPD) between taxa--and a recent machine learning tool, Convolutional Kitchen Sinks (CKS). Both methods perform well across a range of phylogenetically informative evolutionary models, but CKS outperforms MPD as tree size increases. We demonstrate CKS by inferring the evolutionary history of freeze tolerance in angiosperms. Our analysis is consistent with a late burst model of freeze tolerance, suggesting it evolved recently. We suggest that data ordered on phylogenies such as trait values, species interactions, or community presence/absence are good candidates for CKS modeling because the generative models produce structured differences between neighboring points that CKS is well-suited for. We introduce the R package <em>kitchen</em> to perform CKS for generic application of the technique.</p>