Currently, the beast.base.spec.evolution.substitutionmodel.GTR class is made available through BEAUti. This class accepts six individual rates as an input (rateAC, rateAG, ...). These rates are IID but one of them is fixed to 1 so they are identifiable.
I suggest this class is removed from the BEAUti templates entirely and replaced with beast.base.spec.evolution.substitutionmodel.GeneralSubstitutionModel, which takes on a vector of rates. These rates should have a Dirichlet distribution by default, with shapes that reflect our prior expectation that transitions are more common than transversions, for example a default of Dirichlet(rAC=2, rAG=4, rAT=2, rCG=2, rCT=4, rGT=2). This parameterisation is more natural and we should take this chance to move away form the previous one.
Currently, the
beast.base.spec.evolution.substitutionmodel.GTRclass is made available through BEAUti. This class accepts six individual rates as an input (rateAC, rateAG, ...). These rates are IID but one of them is fixed to 1 so they are identifiable.I suggest this class is removed from the BEAUti templates entirely and replaced with
beast.base.spec.evolution.substitutionmodel.GeneralSubstitutionModel, which takes on a vector of rates. These rates should have a Dirichlet distribution by default, with shapes that reflect our prior expectation that transitions are more common than transversions, for example a default ofDirichlet(rAC=2, rAG=4, rAT=2, rCG=2, rCT=4, rGT=2). This parameterisation is more natural and we should take this chance to move away form the previous one.