Related papers: Five Statistical Questions about the Tree of Life
Simple stochastic models for phylogenetic trees on species have been well studied. But much paleontology data concerns time series or trees on higher-order taxa, and any broad picture of relationships between extant groups requires use of…
There have been many studies to examine whether one trait is correlated with another trait across a group of present-day species (for example, do species with larger brains tend to have longer gestation times. Since the introduction of the…
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…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
In molecular systematics, evolutionary trees are reconstructed from sequences at the tips under simple models of site substitution. A central question is how much sequence data is required to reconstruct a tree accurately? The answer…
By unifying three foundational principles of modern biology, we develop a mathematical framework to analyze the growing tree of life. Contrary to the static case, where the analogy between phylogenetic trees and the tree that grows in soil…
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…
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and…
A wide variety of stochastic models of cladogenesis (based on speciation and extinction) lead to an identical distribution on phylogenetic tree shapes once the edge lengths are ignored. By contrast, the distribution of the tree's edge…
In evolutionary biology, the speciation history of living organisms is represented graphically by a phylogeny, that is, a rooted tree whose leaves correspond to current species and branchings indicate past speciation events. Phylogenies are…
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…
In conservation biology, phylogenetic diversity (PD) provides a way to quantify the impact of the current rapid extinction of species on the evolutionary `Tree of Life'. This approach recognises that extinction not only removes species but…
Stochastic models, based on random processes, may lead to power law distributions, which provide long range correlations. The observation of power law behavior and the presence of long range correlations in biological systems has been…
Estimating phylogenetic trees is an important problem in evolutionary biology, environmental policy and medicine. Although trees are estimated, their uncertainties are discarded by mathematicians working in tree space. Here we explicitly…
Phylogenetic trees represent the evolutionary relationships between extant lineages, where extinct or non-sampled lineages are omitted. Extending the work of Stadler and collaborators, this paper focuses on the branch lengths in…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
As an alternative to parsimony analyses, stochastic models have been proposed (Lewis, 2001), (Nylander, et al., 2004) for morphological characters, so that maximum likelihood or Bayesian analyses may be used for phylogenetic inference. A…
Statistical consistency in phylogenetics has traditionally referred to the accuracy of estimating phylogenetic parameters for a fixed number of species as we increase the number of characters. However, as sequences are often of fixed length…
Motivated as a null model for comparison with data, we study the following model for a phylogenetic tree on $n$ extant species. The origin of the clade is a random time in the past, whose (improper) distribution is uniform on $(0,\infty)$.…
In biology, a phylogenetic tree is a tool to represent the evolutionary relationship between species. Unfortunately, the classical Schr\"oder tree model is not adapted to take into account the chronology between the branching nodes. In…