Figure 5

The number of paths through the alignment column graph as a function of the number of alignments used to generate the graph. Shown for a set of 10 sequences simulated using DAWG (simulation procedure described in the main text). When crossovers are allowed (corresponding to a mean-field approximation for the conditional marginal for each column), the number of paths increases super-exponentially, resulting in a much higher coverage of the space of possible alignments, and hence more accurate approximations to the posterior probability for each path (see Figure 8).