Related papers: Hedging our bets: the expected contribution of spe…
Conservation science depends on an accurate understanding of what's happening in a given ecosystem. How many species live there? What is the makeup of the population? How is that changing over time? Species Distribution Modeling (SDM) seeks…
Recently, much attention has been given to understanding recombination events along a chromosome in a variety of field. For instance, many population genetics problems are limited by the inaccuracy of inferred evolutionary histories of…
Given i.i.d. data from an unknown distribution, we consider the problem of predicting future items. An adaptive way to estimate the probability density is to recursively subdivide the domain to an appropriate data-dependent granularity. A…
A random forest prediction can be computed by the scalar product of the labels of the training examples and a set of weights that are determined by the leafs of the forest into which the test object falls; each prediction can hence be…
The statistical estimation of phylogenies is always associated with uncertainty, and accommodating this uncertainty is an important component of modern phylogenetic comparative analysis. The birth-death polytomy resolver is a method of…
During the last two decades, ecological speciation has been a major research theme in evolutionary biology. Ecological speciation occurs when reproductive isolation between populations evolves as a result of niche differentiation.…
By providing a framework of accounting for the shared ancestry inherent to all life, phylogenetics is becoming the statistical foundation of biology. The importance of model choice continues to grow as phylogenetic models continue to…
We study the effect of speciation, i.e. the introduction of new species through evolution into communities, in the setting of predator-prey systems. Predator-prey dynamics is classically well modeled by Lotka-Volterra equations, also when…
We use food webs generated by a model to investigate the effects of deleting species on other species in the web and on the web as a whole. The model incorporates a realistic population dynamics, adaptive foragers and other features which…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…
Innovation and its complement exnovation describe the progression of realized possibilities from the past to the future, and the process depends on the structure of the underlying graph. For example, the phylogenetic tree represents the…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
When group members claim a portion of limited resources, it is tempting to invest more effort to get a larger share. However, if everyone acts similarly, they all get the same piece they would obtain without extra effort. This is the…
For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species which comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the…
Our paper computationally explores the extinction dynamics of an animal species effected by a sudden spike in mortality due to an extreme event. In our study, the animal species has a 2-year life cycle and is endowed with a high survival…
We study a model of a multi-species ecosystem described by Lotka-Volterra-like equations. Interactions among species form a network whose evolution is determined by the dynamics of the model. Numerical simulations show power-law…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
Because biological processes can make different loci have different evolutionary histories, species tree estimation requires multiple loci from across the genome. While many processes can result in discord between gene trees and species…
In evolutionary biology, the speciation history of living organisms is represented graphically by a phylogeny, that is, a rooted tree whose leaves correspond to current species and branchings indicate past speciation events. Phylogenies are…
Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event…