Related papers: Circumstances in which parsimony but not compatibi…
Finding optimal evolutionary trees from sequence data is typically an intractable problem, and there is usually no way of knowing how close to optimal the best tree from some search truly is. The problem would seem to be particularly acute…
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…
In phylogenetic analysis, for non-molecular data, particularly morphology, parsimony optimization is the most commonly employed approach. In the past and present application of the parsimony principle, extra step numbers have been added…
Applying a method to reconstruct a phylogenetic tree from random data provides a way to detect whether that method has an inherent bias towards certain tree `shapes'. For maximum parsimony, applied to a sequence of random 2-state data, each…
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…
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…
In phylogenetic studies, biologists often wish to estimate the ancestral discrete character state at an interior vertex $v$ of an evolutionary tree $T$ from the states that are observed at the leaves of the tree. A simple and fast…
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…
Tuffley and Steel (1997) proved that Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Parsimony methods in phylogenetics are equivalent for sequences of characters under a simple symmetric model of substitution with no common mechanism. This result has been…
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…
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)…
Phylogenetic mixture models are statistical models of character evolution allowing for heterogeneity. Each of the classes in some unknown partition of the characters may evolve by different processes, or even along different trees. The…
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…
Evolution is a process that is influenced by various environmental factors, e.g. the interactions between different species, genes, and biogeographical properties. Hence, it is interesting to study the combined evolutionary history of…
Phylogenetic trees are leaf-labelled trees used to model the evolution of species. In practice it is not uncommon to obtain two topologically distinct trees for the same set of species, and this motivates the use of distance measures to…
Phylogenetic networks are used to display the relationship of different species whose evolution is not treelike, which is the case, for instance, in the presence of hybridization events or horizontal gene transfers. Tree inference methods…
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…
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…
Reconciling a gene tree with a species tree is an important task that reveals much about the evolution of genes, genomes, and species, as well as about the molecular function of genes. A wide array of computational tools have been devised…
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…