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The Connectivity Augmentation Problem (CAP) together with a well-known special case thereof known as the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP) are among the most basic Network Design problems. There has been a surge of interest recently to find…
'Tree-based' phylogenetic networks proposed by Francis and Steel have attracted much attention of theoretical biologists in the last few years. At the heart of the definitions of tree-based phylogenetic networks is the notion of 'support…
Random Forests (RF) is a popular machine learning method for classification and regression problems. It involves a bagging application to decision tree models. One of the primary advantages of the Random Forests model is the reduction in…
This paper studies a Markov chain for phylogenetic reconstruction which uses a popular transition between tree topologies known as subtree pruning-and-regrafting (SPR). We analyze the Markov chain in the simpler setting that the generating…
The problem of reconstructing evolutionary trees or phylogenies is of great interest in computational biology. A popular model for this problem assumes that we are given the set of leaves (current species) of an unknown binary tree and the…
In the laminar-constrained spanning tree problem, the goal is to find a minimum-cost spanning tree which respects upper bounds on the number of times each cut in a given laminar family is crossed. This generalizes the well-studied…
In this paper we investigate an extremal problem on binary phylogenetic trees. Given two such trees $T_1$ and $T_2$, both with leaf-set ${1,2,...,n}$, we are interested in the size of the largest subset $S \subseteq {1,2,...,n}$ of leaves…
In this paper, we lay the groundwork on the comparison of phylogenetic networks based on edge contractions and expansions as edit operations, as originally proposed by Robinson and Foulds to compare trees. We prove that these operations…
Given a graph $G=(V,E)$ with non-negative real edge lengths and an integer parameter $k$, the Min-Max k-Tree Cover problem seeks to find a set of at most $k$ subtrees of $G$, such that the union of the trees is the vertex set $V$. The…
This paper introduces constNJ, the first algorithm for phylogenetic reconstruction of sets of trees with constrained pairwise rooted subtree-prune regraft (rSPR) distance. We are motivated by the problem of constructing sets of trees which…
The basic goal of survivable network design is to build cheap networks that guarantee the connectivity of certain pairs of nodes despite the failure of a few edges or nodes. A celebrated result by Jain [Combinatorica'01] provides a…
Determining the interaction partners among protein/domain families poses hard computational problems, in particular in the presence of paralogous proteins. Available approaches aim to identify interaction partners among protein/domain…
A central task in the study of molecular sequence data from present-day species is the reconstruction of the ancestral relationships. The most established approach to tree reconstruction is the maximum likelihood (ML) method. In this…
We present a simple 4-approximation algorithm for computing a maximum agreement forest of multiple unrooted binary trees. This algorithm applies LP rounding to an extension of a recent ILP formulation of the maximum agreement forest problem…
Phylogenetic networks are used to represent the evolutionary history of species. Recently, the new class of orchard networks was introduced, which were later shown to be interpretable as trees with additional horizontal arcs. This makes the…
Finding a minimum spanning tree (MST) for $n$ points in an arbitrary metric space is a fundamental primitive for hierarchical clustering and many other ML tasks, but this takes $\Omega(n^2)$ time to even approximate. We introduce a…
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…
In this experimental study we consider Steiner tree approximations that guarantee a constant approximation of ratio smaller than $2$. The considered greedy algorithms and approaches based on linear programming involve the incorporation of…
An evolutionary tree is a rooted tree where each internal vertex has at least two children and where the leaves are labeled with distinct symbols representing species. Evolutionary trees are useful for modeling the evolutionary history of…
We introduce new methods for phylogenetic tree quartet construction by using machine learning to optimize the power of phylogenetic invariants. Phylogenetic invariants are polynomials in the joint probabilities which vanish under a model of…