Related papers: Maximum Likelihood Supertrees
Tree-based phylogenetic networks, which may be roughly defined as leaf-labeled networks built by adding arcs only between the original tree edges, have elegant properties for modeling evolutionary histories. We answer an open question of…
Phylogenetic trees are leaf-labelled trees, where the leaves correspond to extant species (taxa), and the internal vertices represent ancestral species. The evolutionary history of a set of species can be explained by more than one…
The reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from mixed populations has become important in the study of cancer evolution, as sequencing is often performed on bulk tumor tissue containing mixed populations of cells. Recent work has shown how to…
Mechanistic network models specify the mechanisms by which networks grow and change, allowing researchers to investigate complex systems using both simulation and analytical techniques. Unfortunately, it is difficult to write likelihoods…
Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…
In this paper, we investigate a conjecture by von Haeseler concerning the Maximum Parsimony method for phylogenetic estimation, which was published by the Newton Institute in Cambridge on a list of open phylogenetic problems in 2007. This…
Combining a set of phylogenetic trees into a single phylogenetic network that explains all of them is a fundamental challenge in evolutionary studies. Existing methods are computationally expensive and can either handle only small numbers…
Finding a minimum spanning tree (MST) for $n$ points in an arbitrary metric space is a fundamental primitive for hierarchical clustering and many other ML tasks, but this takes $\Omega(n^2)$ time to even approximate. We introduce a…
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…
We consider a broadcasting problem on a tree where a binary digit (e.g., a spin or a nucleotide's purine/pyrimidine type) is propagated from the root to the leaves through symmetric noisy channels on the edges that randomly flip the state…
With advances in sequencing technologies, there are now massive amounts of genomic data from across all life, leading to the possibility that a robust Tree of Life can be constructed. However, "gene tree heterogeneity", which is when…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target…
Probability estimation of tree topologies is one of the fundamental tasks in phylogenetic inference. The recently proposed subsplit Bayesian networks (SBNs) provide a powerful probabilistic graphical model for tree topology probability…
The reconstruction of a central tendency `species tree' from a large number of conflicting gene trees is a central problem in systematic biology. Moreover, it becomes particularly problematic when taxon coverage is patchy, so that not all…
Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo explores tree space slowly, in part because it frequently returns to the same tree topology. An alternative strategy would be to explore tree space systematically, and never return to the same topology. In…
Phylogenetic trees describe the relationships between species in the evolutionary process, and provide information about the rates of diversification. To understand the mechanisms behind macroevolution, we consider a class of multitype…
Tree reconstruction methods are often judged by their accuracy, measured by how close they get to the true tree. Yet most reconstruction methods like ML do not explicitly maximize this accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a…
Recent theoretical work has demonstrated that Neighbor Joining applied to concatenated DNA sequences is a statistically consistent method of species tree reconstruction. This brief note compares the accuracy of this approach to other…
We investigate the optimization landscape of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for the Cavender-Farris-Neyman (CFN) model, a two-state latent tree model fundamental to statistical phylogenetics and the ferromagnetic Ising model. Although…
The fusion of independently obtained stochastic maps by collaborating mobile agents is considered. The proposed approach includes two parts: matching of stochastic maps and maximum likelihood alignment. In particular, an affine invariant…