Related papers: Ancestral Inference from Functional Data: Statisti…
Many biological characteristics of evolutionary interest are not scalar variables but continuous functions. Given a dataset of function-valued traits generated by evolution, we develop a practical statistical approach to infer ancestral…
Biological data objects often have both of the following features: (i) they are functions rather than single numbers or vectors, and (ii) they are correlated due to phylogenetic relationships. In this paper we give a flexible statistical…
Phylogenetic comparative methods explore the relationships between quantitative traits adjusting for shared evolutionary history. This adjustment often occurs through a Brownian diffusion process along the branches of the phylogeny that…
Implementing Bayesian variable selection for linear Gaussian regression models for analysing high dimensional data sets is of current interest in many fields. In order to make such analysis operational, we propose a new sampling algorithm…
In past decades, Gaussian processes has been widely applied in studying trait evolution using phylogenetic comparative analysis. In particular, two members of Gaussian processes: Brownian motion and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, have been…
The ancestral sequence reconstruction problem is the inference, back in time, of the properties of common sequence ancestors from measured properties of contemporary populations. Standard algorithms for this problem assume independent…
Genetic data are often used to infer demographic history and changes or detect genes under selection. Inferential methods are commonly based on models making various strong assumptions: demography and population structures are supposed…
We are interested in the evolving genealogy of a birth and death process with trait structure and ecological interactions. Traits are hereditarily transmitted from a parent to its offspring unless a mutation occurs. The dynamics may depend…
We focus on variational inference in dynamical systems where the discrete time transition function (or evolution rule) is modelled by a Gaussian process. The dominant approach so far has been to use a factorised posterior distribution,…
Phylogenetic PCA (p-PCA) is a version of PCA for observations that are leaf nodes of a phylogenetic tree. P-PCA accounts for the fact that such observations are not independent, due to shared evolutionary history. The method works on…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…
This paper describes a methodology for analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of genetic programming (GP) using genealogical information, diversity measures and information about the fitness variation from parent to offspring. We introduce a…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
Discovering evolutionary traits that are heritable across species on the tree of life (also referred to as a phylogenetic tree) is of great interest to biologists to understand how organisms diversify and evolve. However, the measurement of…
Within the past two decades, Gaussian process regression has been increasingly used for modeling dynamical systems due to some beneficial properties such as the bias variance trade-off and the strong connection to Bayesian mathematics. As…
A phylogeny describes the evolutionary history of an evolving population. Evolutionary search algorithms can perfectly track the ancestry of candidate solutions, illuminating a population's trajectory through the search space. However,…
Locally weighted regression was created as a nonparametric learning method that is computationally efficient, can learn from very large amounts of data and add data incrementally. An interesting feature of locally weighted regression is…
In this contribution we describe an approach to evolve composite covariance functions for Gaussian processes using genetic programming. A critical aspect of Gaussian processes and similar kernel-based models such as SVM is, that the…
A simple way to model phenotypic evolution is to assume that after splitting, the trait values of the sister species diverge as independent Brownian motions. Relying only on a prior distribution for the underlying species tree (conditioned…