Related papers: Ancestral sequence reconstruction with Maximum Par…
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…
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…
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,…
Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Here, based on an idea of Bruen and Bryant, we propose and analyze a new distance measure: the Maximum Parsimony (MP)…
We analyse a maximum-likelihood approach for combining phylogenetic trees into a larger `supertree'. This is based on a simple exponential model of phylogenetic error, which ensures that ML supertrees have a simple combinatorial description…
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…
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…
Predicting the ancestral sequences of a group of homologous sequences related by a phylogenetic tree has been the subject of many studies, and numerous methods have been proposed to this purpose. Theoretical results are available that show…
Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Recently, a new distance measure has been proposed: the Maximum Parsimony (MP) distance. This is based on the…
We consider the problem of inferring an ancestral state from observations at the leaves of a tree, assuming the state evolves along the tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process. We establish a general branching rate condition…
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…
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…
Likelihood-based methods are widely considered the best approaches for reconstructing ancestral states. Although much effort has been made to study properties of these methods, previous works often assume that both the tree topology and…
Maximum likelihood is one of the most widely used techniques to infer evolutionary histories. Although it is thought to be intractable, a proof of its hardness has been lacking. Here, we give a short proof that computing the maximum…
We examine a mathematical question concerning the reconstruction accuracy of the Fitch algorithm for reconstructing the ancestral sequence of the most recent common ancestor given a phylogenetic tree and sequence data for all taxa under…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…