Department of Biological Sciences, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho 83844, USA.
Evolution. 2010 Jul;64(7):2173-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.00973.x. Epub 2010 Jan 15.
The Mantel test, based on comparisons of distance matrices, is commonly employed in comparative biology, but its statistical properties in this context are unknown. Here, we evaluate the performance of the Mantel test for two applications in comparative biology: testing for phylogenetic signal, and testing for an evolutionary correlation between two characters. We find that the Mantel test has poor performance compared to alternative methods, including low power and, under some circumstances, inflated type-I error. We identify a remedy for the inflated type-I error of three-way Mantel tests using phylogenetic permutations; however, this test still has considerably lower power than independent contrasts. We recommend that use of the Mantel test should be restricted to cases in which data can only be expressed as pairwise distances among taxa.
曼特尔检验基于距离矩阵的比较，常用于比较生物学，但在这种情况下，其统计特性是未知的。在这里，我们评估了曼特尔检验在比较生物学中的两个应用的性能：检验系统发育信号，以及检验两个特征之间的进化相关性。我们发现，与替代方法相比，曼特尔检验的性能较差，包括低功效和在某些情况下，I 型错误膨胀。我们找到了一种纠正三向曼特尔检验的 I 型错误膨胀的方法，即使用系统发育置换；然而，与独立对比相比，这种检验的功效仍然低得多。我们建议，只有在数据只能表示为分类群之间的成对距离的情况下，才应使用曼特尔检验。
