Related papers: Identifiability of 2-tree mixtures for group-based…
Phylogenetic inference, grounded in molecular evolution models, is essential for understanding the evolutionary relationships in biological data. Accounting for the uncertainty of phylogenetic tree variables, which include tree topologies…
We consider phylogeny estimation under a two-state model of sequence evolution by site substitution on a tree. In the asymptotic regime where the sequence lengths tend to infinity, we show that for any fixed $k$ no statistically consistent…
Molecular phylogeny has focused mainly on improving models for the reconstruction of gene trees based on sequence alignments. Yet, most phylogeneticists seek to reveal the history of species. Although the histories of genes and species are…
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…
The bifactor model and its extensions are multidimensional latent variable models, under which each item measures up to one subdimension on top of the primary dimension(s). Despite their wide applications to educational and psychological…
Methods of phylogenetic inference use more and more complex models to generate trees from data. However, even simple models and their implications are not fully understood. Here, we investigate the two-state Markov model on a tripod tree,…
Phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) are widely used to study trait evolution. However, many evolutionary histories involve reticulate evolutionary scenarios, such as hybridization, that violate core assumptions of these methods. In this…
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…
Tree-shaped graphical models are widely used for their tractability. However, they unfortunately lack expressive power as they require committing to a particular sparse dependency structure. We propose a novel class of generative models…
Fixed tree topologies are widely used in phylodynamic analyses to reduce computational burden, yet the consequences of this assumption remain insufficiently understood. Here, we systematically assess the impact of various fixed-topology…
The inference of phylogenetic networks, which model complex evolutionary processes including hybridization and gene flow, remains a central challenge in evolutionary biology. Until now, statistically consistent inference methods have been…
Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees to leaf-labeled directed acyclic graphs that represent ancestral relationships between species whose past includes non-tree-like events such as hybridization and horizontal…
Identifiability of parameters is an essential property for a statistical model to be useful in most settings. However, establishing parameter identifiability for Bayesian networks with hidden variables remains challenging. In the context of…
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…
Given a gene tree and a species tree, ancestral configurations represent the combinatorially distinct sets of gene lineages that can reach a given node of the species tree. They have been introduced as a data structure for use in the…
Existing genetic programming (GP) methods are typically designed based on a certain representation, such as tree-based or linear representations. These representations show various pros and cons in different domains. However, due to the…
A grand challenge in biology is to discover evolutionary traits - features of organisms common to a group of species with a shared ancestor in the tree of life (also referred to as phylogenetic tree). With the growing availability of image…
This paper studies identifiability and convergence behaviors for parameters of multiple types in finite mixtures, and the effects of model fitting with extra mixing components. First, we present a general theory for strong identifiability,…
We study identifiability of the parameters in autoregressions defined on a network. Most identification conditions that are available for these models either rely on the network being observed repeatedly, are only sufficient, or require…
In this paper we investigate undirected discrete graphical tree models when all the variables in the system are binary, where leaves represent the observable variables and where all the inner nodes are unobserved. A novel approach based on…