Related papers: Incomplete Lineage Sorting: Consistent Phylogeny E…
I propose an approach to identify, among several strategies of phylogenetic analysis, those producing the most accurate results. This approach is based on the hypothesis that the more a result is reproduced from independent data, the more…
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or…
In a population with haploid reproduction any individual has a single parent in the previous generation. If all genealogical distances among pairs of individuals (generations from the closest common ancestor) are known it is possible to…
The reconstruction of the history of evolutionary genome-wide events among a set of related organisms is of great biological interest. A simplified model that captures only content modifying operations was introduced recently. It allows the…
When gene copies are sampled from various species, the resulting gene tree might disagree with the containing species tree. The primary causes of gene tree and species tree discord include lineage sorting, horizontal gene transfer, and gene…
We study various types of consistency of honest decision trees and random forests in the regression setting. In contrast to related literature, our proofs are elementary and follow the classical arguments used for smoothing methods. Under…
We introduce a new algorithm called {\sc Rec-Gen} for reconstructing the genealogy or \textit{pedigree} of an extant population purely from its genetic data. We justify our approach by giving a mathematical proof of the effectiveness of…
We propose and study a multi-scale approach to vector quantization. We develop an algorithm, dubbed reconstruction trees, inspired by decision trees. Here the objective is parsimonious reconstruction of unsupervised data, rather than…
The probability that two randomly selected phylogenetic trees of the same size are isomorphic is found to be asymptotic to a decreasing exponential modulated by a polynomial factor. The number of symmetrical nodes in a random phylogenetic…
Gene trees are evolutionary trees representing the ancestry of genes sampled from multiple populations. Species trees represent populations of individuals -- each with many genes -- splitting into new populations or species. The coalescent…
Besides serving as prediction models, classification trees are useful for finding important predictor variables and identifying interesting subgroups in the data. These functions can be compromised by weak split selection algorithms that…
How do phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms go astray when they return incorrect trees? This simple question has not been answered in detail, even for maximum parsimony (MP), the simplest phylogenetic criterion. Understanding MP has…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
The Persistent-Phylogeny Model is an extension of the widely studied Perfect-Phylogeny Model, encompassing a broader range of evolutionary phenomena. Biological and algorithmic questions concerning persistent phylogeny have been intensely…
Motivation: Many inference tools use the Perfect Phylogeny Model (PPM) to learn trees from noisy variant allele frequency (VAF) data. Learning in this setting is hard, and existing tools use approximate or heuristic algorithms. An…
Motivation: While the majority of gene histories found in a clade of organisms are expected to be generated by a common process (e.g. the coalescent process), it is well-known that numerous other coexisting processes (e.g. horizontal gene…
Reconstructing the evolutionary past of a family of genes is an important aspect of many genomic studies. To help with this, simple operations on a set of sequences called orthology relations may be employed. In addition to being…
Trees are fundamental data structure for many areas of computer science and system engineering. In this report, we show how to ensure eventual consistency of optimistically replicated trees. In optimistic replication, the different replicas…
Sequence comparison and alignment has had an enormous impact on our understanding of evolution, biology, and disease. Comparison and alignment of biological networks will likely have a similar impact. Existing network alignments use…
Statistical consistency in phylogenetics has traditionally referred to the accuracy of estimating phylogenetic parameters for a fixed number of species as we increase the number of characters. However, as sequences are often of fixed length…