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Modelling the substitution of nucleotides along a phylogenetic tree is usually done by a hidden Markov process. This allows to define a distribution of characters at the leaves of the trees and one might be able to obtain polynomial…
The Forest Augmentation Problem (FAP) asks for a minimum set of additional edges (links) that make a given forest 2-edge-connected while spanning all vertices. A key special case is the Path Augmentation Problem (PAP), where the input…
We study the problem of learning tree-structured Markov random fields (MRF) on discrete random variables with common support when the observations are corrupted by a $k$-ary symmetric noise channel with unknown probability of error. For…
Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that allow for representation of reticulate evolution. Recently, a space of unrooted phylogenetic networks was introduced, where such a network is a connected graph in which…
Evolutionary relationships between species are usually inferred through phylogenetic analysis, which provides phylogenetic trees computed from allelic profiles built by sequencing specific regions of the sequences and abstracting them to…
The popular neighbor-joining (NJ) algorithm used in phylogenetics is a greedy algorithm for finding the balanced minimum evolution (BME) tree associated to a dissimilarity map. From this point of view, NJ is ``optimal'' when the algorithm…
Phylogenetic networks generalize phylogenetic trees by allowing reticulate evolutionary events such as horizontal gene transfer and hybridization. Among the many subclasses of phylogenetic networks, orchard networks have attracted…
Phylogenetic reconciliation seeks to explain host-symbiont co-evolution by mapping parasite trees onto host trees through events such as cospeciation, duplication, host switching, and loss. Finding an optimal reconciliation that ensures…
We consider the following basic problem in phylogenetic tree construction. Let $\mathcal{P} = \{T_1, \ldots, T_k\}$ be a collection of rooted phylogenetic trees over various subsets of a set of species. The tree compatibility problem asks…
The arboricity $\Gamma$ of a graph is the minimum number of forests its edge set can be partitioned into. Previous approximation schemes were nonconstructive, i.e., they only approximated the arboricity as a value without computing a…
Bayesian inference is now a leading technique for reconstructing phylogenetic trees from aligned sequence data. In this short note, we formally show that the maximum posterior tree topology provides a statistically consistent estimate of a…
The presence of reticulate evolutionary events in phylogenies turn phylogenetic trees into phylogenetic networks. These events imply in particular that there may exist multiple evolutionary paths from a non-extant species to an extant one,…
We introduce a graph partitioning problem motivated by computational topology and propose two algorithms that produce approximate solutions. Specifically, given a weighted, undirected graph $G$ and a positive integer $k$, we desire to find…
Given a set $P$ of terminals in the plane and a partition of $P$ into $k$ subsets $P_1, ..., P_k$, a two-level rectilinear Steiner tree consists of a rectilinear Steiner tree $T_i$ connecting the terminals in each set $P_i$ ($i=1,...,k$)…
Frequencies of $k$-mers in sequences are sometimes used as a basis for inferring phylogenetic trees without first obtaining a multiple sequence alignment. We show that a standard approach of using the squared-Euclidean distance between…
Ancestral maximum likelihood (AML) is a method that simultaneously reconstructs a phylogenetic tree and ancestral sequences from extant data (sequences at the leaves). The tree and ancestral sequences maximize the probability of observing…
The search for similarity and dissimilarity measures on phylogenetic trees has been motivated by the computation of consensus trees, the search by similarity in phylogenetic databases, and the assessment of clustering results in…
For a phylogenetic tree, the phylogenetic diversity of a set A of taxa is the total weight of edges on paths to A. Finding small sets of maximal diversity is crucial for conservation planning, as it indicates where limited resources can be…
Deciding whether there is a single tree -a supertree- that summarizes the evolutionary information in a collection of unrooted trees is a fundamental problem in phylogenetics. We consider two versions of this question: agreement and…
We provide a local probabilistic description of the limiting statistics of large preferential attachment trees in terms of the ordinary degree (number of neighbors) but augmented with information on leafdegree (number of neighbors that are…