Sampled Ancestors

August 17, 2026 · View on GitHub

CI & Publish

This BEAST 3 package provides MCMC proposals and post-processing tools for samples of trees containing sampled ancestors. It relies on the support for sampled-ancestor trees built into the beast.base.evolution.tree.Tree class.

Single Maven artifact: io.github.compevol:sampled-ancestors. JPMS module: sampled.ancestors.

The paper describing this package is:

Alexandra Gavryushkina, David Welch, Tanja Stadler, Alexei J. Drummond (2014) Bayesian Inference of Sampled Ancestor Trees for Epidemiology and Fossil Calibration. PLoS Computational Biology https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003919

Building from source

Requirements:

  • JDK 25 or later
  • Apache Maven
mvn compile

To run an example:

mvn exec:exec -Dbeast.args="examples/bears.xml"

To launch BEAUti:

mvn exec:exec -Dbeast.module=beast.fx -Dbeast.main=beastfx.app.beauti.Beauti

Project structure

sa.app.simulators

Simulators for the fossilized birth-death (FBD) model and FBD-skyline model.

sa.app.tools

Conversion tools between zero-branch-length sampled-ancestor trees and native sampled-ancestor trees.

sa.app.tools.fx

SATreeTraceAnalysis and various other post-processing tools.

sa.evolution.operators

Operators that permit MCMC on sampled-ancestor trees.

sa.evolution.speciation

SpeciesTreeDistribution calculations for the FBD prior:

  • SABirthDeathModel -- FBD prior with multiple hard-coded parameterizations
  • ParameterizedSABirthDeathModel -- FBD prior with object-oriented parameterizations

sa.beauti

BEAUti input editors for sampled-ancestor priors.

fxtemplates

Contains FBD.xml, a BEAUti template for SABirthDeathModel and sampled-ancestor tree operators. Located at src/main/resources/sampled.ancestors/fxtemplates/.

Release

1. Maven Central release (JARs)

Push a v* tag to trigger .github/workflows/ci-publish.yml, which sets the Maven version from the tag, builds, tests, GPG-signs, and publishes to Maven Central:

git tag v2.3.0
git push origin v2.3.0

Monitor the run at: https://github.com/CompEvol/sampled-ancestors/actions/workflows/ci-publish.yml

2. GitHub release (BEAST package ZIP)

First remove -SNAPSHOT from <version> in pom.xml so it matches the release (e.g. 2.3.0-SNAPSHOT -> 2.3.0), and snyc the version.xml, then build the installable BEAST package ZIP locally:

mvn clean package -DskipTests

Note: if you skip the manual edit above, the build still succeeds, but the module jar bundled inside the ZIP (lib/model-selection-<version>.jar) will carry the -SNAPSHOT suffix — that's meant for dev/testing builds, not an official release. Alternatively, instead of hand-editing pom.xml, run:

mvn versions:set -DnewVersion=<version> -DgenerateBackupPoms=false

The ZIP is written to target/MODEL_SELECTION.v<version>.zip. Then manually:

  1. Go to https://github.com/CompEvol/sampled-ancestors/releases
  2. Choose the matching tag (e.g. v2.3.0), fill in the release title/notes
  3. Upload target/MODEL_SELECTION.v<version>.zip as a release asset
  4. Publish

License

This software is free (as in freedom). With your modified versions provided you extend the same courtesy to users of your modified version. Specifically, it is made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.

Acknowledgements

Work on this project was supported by: