Figure 6

Performance of Csűrös, RG, Dollo parsimony, and EREM methods for the four-taxa case under intron loss rate variation with loss rates given by a standard gamma distribution with indicated alpha value, in which 30% or 70% of introns are lost along each external branch. The actual number of simulated ancestral intron numbers is 1,000; thus, both Csűrös and Dollo methods underestimate ancestral density under all cases. The relevant phylogeny is given in Additional file 2.