Related papers: The most parsimonious tree for random data
Phylogenetic (i.e. leaf-labeled) trees play a fundamental role in evolutionary research. A typical problem is to reconstruct such trees from data like DNA alignments (whose columns are often referred to as characters), and a simple…
Phylogenetic networks are often constructed by merging multiple conflicting phylogenetic signals into a directed acyclic graph. It is interesting to explore whether a network constructed in this way induces biologically-relevant…
In this paper, we investigate a conjecture by von Haeseler concerning the Maximum Parsimony method for phylogenetic estimation, which was published by the Newton Institute in Cambridge on a list of open phylogenetic problems in 2007. This…
Estimating phylogenetic trees, which depict the relationships between different species, from aligned sequence data (such as DNA, RNA, or proteins) is one of the main aims of evolutionary biology. However, tree reconstruction criteria like…
One of the main aims in phylogenetics is the estimation of ancestral sequences based on present-day data like, for instance, DNA alignments. One way to estimate the data of the last common ancestor of a given set of species is to first…
Phylogenetic methods typically rely on an appropriate model of how data evolved in order to infer an accurate phylogenetic tree. For molecular data, standard statistical methods have provided an effective strategy for extracting…
Construction of phylogenetic trees has traditionally focused on binary trees where all species appear on leaves, a problem for which numerous efficient solutions have been developed. Certain application domains though, such as viral…
Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Recently, a new distance measure has been proposed: the Maximum Parsimony (MP) distance. This is based on the…
Phylogenetic trees play a key role in the reconstruction of evolutionary relationships. Typically, they are derived from aligned sequence data (like DNA, RNA, or proteins) by using optimization criteria like, e.g., maximum parsimony (MP).…
We analyse a maximum-likelihood approach for combining phylogenetic trees into a larger `supertree'. This is based on a simple exponential model of phylogenetic error, which ensures that ML supertrees have a simple combinatorial description…
Phylogenetic trees are frequently used to model evolution. Such trees are typically reconstructed from data like DNA, RNA, or protein alignments using methods based on criteria like maximum parsimony (amongst others). Maximum parsimony has…
The probability that two randomly selected phylogenetic trees of the same size are isomorphic is found to be asymptotic to a decreasing exponential modulated by a polynomial factor. The number of symmetrical nodes in a random phylogenetic…
How do phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms go astray when they return incorrect trees? This simple question has not been answered in detail, even for maximum parsimony (MP), the simplest phylogenetic criterion. Understanding MP has…
One of the main aims of phylogenetics is the reconstruction of the correct evolutionary tree when data concerning the underlying species set are given. These data typically come in the form of DNA, RNA or protein alignments, which consist…
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…
Finding the most parsimonious tree inside a phylogenetic network with respect to a given character is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that for many network topologies is essentially inapproximable. In contrast, if the network…
Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Here, based on an idea of Bruen and Bryant, we propose and analyze a new distance measure: the Maximum Parsimony (MP)…
Maximum parsimony is one of the most frequently-discussed tree reconstruction methods in phylogenetic estimation. However, in recent years it has become more and more apparent that phylogenetic trees are often not sufficient to describe…
Given two phylogenetic trees on the same set of taxa X, the maximum parsimony distance d_MP is defined as the maximum, ranging over all characters c on X, of the absolute difference in parsimony score induced by c on the two trees. In this…
The so-called binary perfect phylogeny with persistent characters has recently been thoroughly studied in computational biology as it is less restrictive than the well known binary perfect phylogeny. Here, we focus on the notion of (binary)…