Rate Variations, Phylogenetics, and Partial Orders

The systematic assessment of rate variations across large datasets requires a systematic approach for summarizing results from individual tests. Often, this is performed by coarse-graining the phylogeny to consider rate variations at the level of sub-claded. In a phylo-geographic setting, however, one is often more interested in other partitions of the data, and in an exploratory mode a pre-specified subdivision of the data is often undesirable. We propose here to arrange rate variation data as the partially ordered set defined by the significant test results.