Related papers: Phylogenies without Branch Bounds: Contracting the…
Probabilistic programming frameworks are powerful tools for statistical modelling and inference. They are not immediately generalisable to phylogenetic problems due to the particular computational properties of the phylogenetic tree object.…
Least squares estimation of phylogenies is an established family of methods with good statistical properties. State-of-the-art least squares phylogenetic estimation proceeds by first estimating a distance matrix, which is then used to…
Regression forests have long delivered state-of-the-art accuracy, often outperforming regression trees and even neural networks, but they suffer from limited interpretability as ensemble methods. In this work, we revisit forest pruning, an…
Phylogenetic trees are a central tool in understanding evolution. They are typically inferred from sequence data, and capture evolutionary relationships through time. It is essential to be able to compare trees from different data sources…
Recent work has proven the existence of extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample taken from the contemporary UK population \cite{nature_01}. This result brings our attention again to a math problem related to inbreeding family trees…
In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing trees from traces in the tree edit distance model. Previous work by Davies et al. (2019) analyzed special cases of reconstructing labeled trees. In this work, we significantly expand…
The Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a computational abstraction that represents a partial summary either of indel history, or of structural similarity. Taking the former view (indel history), it is possible to use formal automata…
We study a character-based phylogeny reconstruction problem when an incomplete set of data is given. More specifically, we consider the situation under the directed perfect phylogeny assumption with binary characters in which for some…
Null models of binary phylogenetic trees are useful for testing hypotheses on real world phylogenies. In this paper we consider phylogenies as binary trees without edge lengths together with a sampling measure and encode them as algebraic…
There are few, if any, algorithms in statistical phylogenetics which are used more heavily than Felsenstein's 1973 pruning method for computing the likelihood of a tree. We present LvD, (Likelihood via Decomposition), an alternative to…
We present an efficient algorithm to reduce the size of nondeterministic tree automata, while retaining their language. It is based on new transition pruning techniques, and quotienting of the state space w.r.t. suitable equivalences. It…
In an extant population, how much information do extant individuals provide on the pedigree of their ancestors? Recent work by Kim, Mossel, Ramnarayan and Turner (2020) studied this question under a number of simplifying assumptions,…
Finding the most parsimonious tree inside a phylogenetic network with respect to a given character is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that for many network topologies is essentially inapproximable. In contrast, if the network…
An evolutionary tree (phylogenetic tree) is a binary, rooted, unordered tree that models the evolutionary history of currently living species in which leaves are labeled by species. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding the…
Maximum parsimony distance is a measure used to quantify the dissimilarity of two unrooted phylogenetic trees. It is NP-hard to compute, and very few positive algorithmic results are known due to its complex combinatorial structure. Here we…
Recently much attention has been devoted to the construction of phylogenetic networks which generalize phylogenetic trees in order to accommodate complex evolutionary processes. Here we present an efficient, practical algorithm for…
In the usual trace reconstruction problem, the goal is to exactly reconstruct an unknown string of length $n$ after it passes through a deletion channel many times independently, producing a set of traces (i.e., random subsequences of the…
We introduce and analyze a new technique for model reduction for deep neural networks. While large networks are theoretically capable of learning arbitrarily complex models, overfitting and model redundancy negatively affects the prediction…
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 Subtree Isomorphism problem asks whether a given tree is contained in another given tree. The problem is of fundamental importance and has been studied since the 1960s. For some variants, e.g., ordered trees, near-linear time algorithms…