Related papers: Is your phylogeny informative? Measuring the power…
Cluster analysis has proved to be an invaluable tool for the exploratory and unsupervised analysis of high dimensional datasets. Among methods for clustering, hierarchical approaches have enjoyed substantial popularity in genomics and other…
We introduce MCCE: Monte Carlo sampling of valid and realistic Counterfactual Explanations for tabular data, a novel counterfactual explanation method that generates on-manifold, actionable and valid counterfactuals by modeling the joint…
In many settings, robust data analysis involves computational methods for uncertainty quantification and statistical inference. To design frequentist studies that leverage robust analysis methods, suitable sample sizes to achieve desired…
Bayesian inference involves the specification of a statistical model by a statistician or practitioner, with careful thought about what each parameter represents. This results in particularly interpretable models which can be used to…
Mathematical models are essential for understanding and making predictions about systems arising in nature and engineering. Yet, mathematical models are a simplification of true phenomena, thus making predictions subject to uncertainty.…
Phylogenetic trees describe the evolutionary history of a group of present-day species from a common ancestor. These trees are typically reconstructed from aligned DNA sequence data. In this paper we analytically address the following…
Modern studies increasingly leverage outcomes predicted by machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI/ML) models, and recent work, such as prediction-powered inference (PPI), has developed valid downstream statistical inference…
It is of critical importance to be aware of the historical discrimination embedded in the data and to consider a fairness measure to reduce bias throughout the predictive modeling pipeline. Given various notions of fairness defined in the…
Testing fit of data to model is fundamentally important to any science, but publications in the field of phylogenetics rarely do this. Such analyses discard fundamental aspects of science as prescribed by Karl Popper. Indeed, not without…
Phylogenetic comparative methods correct for shared evolutionary history among a set of non-independent organisms by modeling sample traits as arising from a diffusion process along on the branches of a possibly unknown history. To…
A group of approaches for calculating forensic likelihood ratios first calculates scores which quantify the degree of difference or the degree of similarity between pairs of samples, then converts those scores to likelihood ratios. In order…
Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques for approximating high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. These methods have found numerous applications in…
Monte Carlo methods are widely used for approximating complicated, multidimensional integrals for Bayesian inference. Population Monte Carlo (PMC) is an important class of Monte Carlo methods, which utilizes a population of proposals to…
Local and global inference methods have been developed to infer structural contacts from multiple sequence alignments of homologous proteins. They rely on correlations in amino-acid usage at contacting sites. Because homologous proteins…
Tree shape statistics, particularly measures of tree (im)balance, play an important role in the analysis of the shape of phylogenetic trees. With applications ranging from testing evolutionary models to studying the impact of fertility…
Training data influence estimation methods quantify the contribution of training documents to a model's output, making them a promising source of information for example-based explanations. As humans cannot interpret thousands of documents,…
We introduce a bottleneck method for learning data representations based on information deficiency, rather than the more traditional information sufficiency. A variational upper bound allows us to implement this method efficiently. The…
We introduce an R package, PCMBase, to rapidly calculate the likelihood for multivariate phylogenetic comparative methods. The package is not specific to particular models but offers the user the functionality to very easily implement a…
Probabilistic inference algorithms such as Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) provide powerful tools for constraining procedural models in computer graphics, but they require many samples to produce desirable results. In this paper, we show how…
Understanding which phenotypic traits are consistently correlated throughout evolution is a highly pertinent problem in modern evolutionary biology. Here, we propose a multivariate phylogenetic latent liability model for assessing the…