Related papers: A Statistical Test for Clades in Phylogenies
Computer simulations are an important tool for studying the mechanics of biological evolution. In particular, in silico work with agent-based models provides an opportunity to collect high-quality records of ancestry relationships among…
We present an efficient phylogenetic reconstruction algorithm allowing insertions and deletions which provably achieves a sequence-length requirement (or sample complexity) growing polynomially in the number of taxa. Our algorithm is…
Stochastic modeling of phylogenies raises five questions that have received varying levels of attention from quantitatively inclined biologists. 1) How large do we expect (from the model) the ration of maximum historical diversity to…
There are several tools available to infer phylogenetic trees, which depict the evolutionary relationships among biological entities such as viral and bacterial strains in infectious outbreaks, or cancerous cells in tumor progression trees.…
The reconstruction of a central tendency `species tree' from a large number of conflicting gene trees is a central problem in systematic biology. Moreover, it becomes particularly problematic when taxon coverage is patchy, so that not all…
The branching structure of biological evolution confers statistical dependencies on phenotypic trait values in related organisms. For this reason, comparative macroevolutionary studies usually begin with an inferred phylogeny that describes…
The delimitation of biological species, i.e., deciding which individuals belong to the same species and whether and how many different species are represented in a data set, is key to the conservation of biodiversity. Much existing work…
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…
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…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
The number of extant individuals within a lineage, as exemplified by counts of species numbers across genera in a higher taxonomic category, is known to be a highly skewed distribution. Because the sublineages (such as genera in a clade)…
Detecting variation in the evolutionary process along chromosomes is increasingly important as whole-genome data becomes more widely available. For example, factors such as incomplete lineage sorting, horizontal gene transfer, and…
We present an efficient and flexible method for computing likelihoods of phenotypic traits on a phylogeny. The method does not resort to Monte-Carlo computation but instead blends Felsenstein's discrete character pruning algorithm with…
Quartet Reconstruction, the task of recovering a phylogenetic tree from smaller trees on four species called \textit{quartets}, is a well-studied problem in theoretical computer science with far-reaching connections to statistics, graph…
We study probability distributions over free algebras of trees. Probability distributions can be seen as particular (formal power) tree series [Berstel et al 82, Esik et al 03], i.e. mappings from trees to a semiring K . A widely studied…
A labeled gene tree topology that is more probable than the labeled gene tree topology matching a species tree is called \textit{anomalous}. Species trees that can generate such anomalous gene trees are said to be in the \textit{anomaly…
In this study, we investigate the problem of comparing gene trees reconciled with the same species tree using a novel semi-metric, called the Path-Label Reconciliation (PLR) dissimilarity measure. This approach not only quantifies…
The Persistent-Phylogeny Model is an extension of the widely studied Perfect-Phylogeny Model, encompassing a broader range of evolutionary phenomena. Biological and algorithmic questions concerning persistent phylogeny have been intensely…
Phylogenetic networks provide a means of describing the evolutionary history of sets of species believed to have undergone hybridization or gene flow during their evolution. The mutation process for a set of such species can be modeled as a…
Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a key task in computational biology. It consists in inferring a molecular sequence at an ancestral species of a known phylogeny, given descendant sequences at the tip of the tree. In addition to its many…