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The structure of an evolving network contains information about its past. Extracting this information efficiently, however, is, in general, a difficult challenge. We formulate a fast and efficient method to estimate the most likely history…
Phylogenetic trees are the fundamental mathematical representation of evolutionary processes in biology. They are also objects of interest in pure mathematics, such as algebraic geometry and combinatorics, due to their discrete geometry.…
Distance-based phylogenetic algorithms attempt to solve the NP-hard least squares phylogeny problem by mapping an arbitrary dissimilarity map representing biological data to a tree metric. The set of all dissimilarity maps is a Euclidean…
We investigate parameterized algorithms for computing the average-tree phylogenetic diversity (APD) in rooted phylogenetic networks, studying the problem under different structural parameters that capture the deviation of a network from a…
UPGMA is a heuristic method identifying the least squares equidistant phylogenetic tree given empirical distance data among $n$ taxa. We study this classic algorithm using the geometry of the space of all equidistant trees with $n$ leaves,…
Phylogenetic tree shapes capture fundamental signatures of evolution. We consider ``ranked'' tree shapes, which are equipped with a total order on the internal nodes compatible with the tree graph. Recent work has established an elegant…
Phylogenetic trees are widely used to understand the evolutionary history of organisms. Tree shapes provide information about macroevolutionary processes. However, macroevolutionary models are unreliable for inferring the true processes…
Comparative analyses of phylogenetic trees typically require identical taxon sets, however, in practice, trees often include distinct but overlapping taxa. Pruning non-shared leaves discards phylogenetic signal, whereas tree completion can…
A metric phylogenetic tree relating a collection of taxa induces weighted rooted triples and weighted quartets for all subsets of three and four taxa, respectively. New intertaxon distances are defined that can be calculated from these…
We define, analyze, and give efficient algorithms for two kinds of distance measures for rooted and unrooted phylogenies. For rooted trees, our measures are based on the topologies the input trees induce on triplets; that is, on…
Metrics on rooted phylogenetic trees are integral to a number of areas of phylogenetic analysis. Cluster-similarity metrics have recently been introduced in order to limit skew in the distribution of distances, and to ensure that trees in…
Evolutionary relationships between species are represented by phylogenetic trees, but these relationships are subject to uncertainty due to the random nature of evolution. A geometry for the space of phylogenetic trees is necessary in order…
We propose a statistical method to test whether two phylogenetic trees with given alignments are significantly incongruent. Our method compares the two distributions of phylogenetic trees given by the input alignments, instead of comparing…
The rates-across-sites assumption in phylogenetic inference posits that the rate matrix governing the Markovian evolution of a character on an edge of the putative phylogenetic tree is the product of a character-specific scale factor and a…
We study the problem of how well a tree metric is able to preserve the sum of pairwise distances of an arbitrary metric. This problem is closely related to low-stretch metric embeddings and is interesting by its own flavor from the line of…
Node betweenness has been studied recently by a number of authors, but until now less attention has been paid to edge betweenness. In this paper, we present an exact analytic study of edge betweenness in evolving scale-free and…
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…
We study distorted metrics on binary trees in the context of phylogenetic reconstruction. Given a binary tree $T$ on $n$ leaves with a path metric $d$, consider the pairwise distances $\{d(u,v)\}$ between leaves. It is well known that these…
Semidirected networks have received interest in evolutionary biology as the appropriate generalization of unrooted trees to networks, in which some but not all edges are directed. Yet these networks lack proper theoretical study. We define…
A phylogenetic variety is an algebraic variety parameterized by a statistical model of the evolution of biological sequences along a tree. Understanding this variety is an important problem in the area of algebraic statistics with…