About MorphoRegions
The MorphoRegions package is built to computationally identify regions (morphological, functional, etc.) in serially homologous structures such as, but not limited to, the vertebrate backbone. Regions are modeled as segmented linear regressions with each segment corresponding to a region and region boundaries (or breakpoints) corresponding to changes along the serially homologous structure. The optimal number of regions and their breakpoint positions are identified without a priori assumptions. The algorithm fits increasingly complex models (increasing number of regions). For each given number of regions, all possible combinations of breakpoint positions will be iteratively fitted. Maximum-likelihood methods are then used to identify the best model, as described in Gillet, Jones, and Pierce (Under Review).
