Related papers: A Corrected Parsimony Criterion for Reconstructing…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The parsimony score of a character on a tree equals the number of state changes required to fit that character onto the tree. We show that for unordered, reversible characters this score equals the number of tree rearrangements required to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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 to reconstruct the \enquote{Tree of Life}. In this respect, different methods and criteria are used to analyze DNA sequences of different species and to compare them in order to derive the…
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…
In comparison to phylogenetic trees, phylogenetic networks are more suitable to represent complex evolutionary histories of species whose past includes reticulation such as hybridisation or lateral gene transfer. However, the reconstruction…
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…
Phylogenetic trees are used to model evolution: leaves are labelled to represent contemporary species ("taxa") and interior vertices represent extinct ancestors. Informally, convex characters are measurements on the contemporary species in…
Maximum parsimony distance is a measure used to quantify the dissimilarity of two unrooted phylogenetic trees. It is NP-hard to compute, and very few positive algorithmic results are known due to its complex combinatorial structure. Here we…
In this paper we investigate mathematical questions concerning the reliability (reconstruction accuracy) of Fitch's maximum parsimony algorithm for reconstructing the ancestral state given a phylogenetic tree and a character. In particular,…
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…