Related papers: Exact and approximate limit behaviour of the Yule …
Several indices that measure the degree of balance of a rooted phylogenetic tree have been proposed so far in the literature. In this work we define and study a new index of this kind, which we call the total cophenetic index: the sum, over…
One of the main applications of balance indices is in tests of null models of evolutionary processes. The knowledge of an exact formula for a statistic of a balance index, holding for any number n of leaves, is necessary in order to use…
For two decades, the Colless index has been the most frequently used statistic for assessing the balance of phylogenetic trees. In this article, this statistic is studied under the Yule and uniform model of phylogenetic trees. The main tool…
Efforts to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and understand evolutionary processes depend fundamentally on stochastic models of speciation and mutation. The simplest continuous-time model for speciation in phylogenetic trees is the Yule…
Inferring the ancestral state at the root of a phylogenetic tree from states observed at the leaves is a problem arising in evolutionary biology. The simplest technique -- majority rule -- estimates the root state by the most frequently…
A Yule tree is the result of a branching process with constant birth and death rates. Such a process serves as an instructive null model of many empirical systems, for instance, the evolution of species leading to a phylogenetic tree.…
Diversification is nested, and early models suggested this could lead to a great deal of evolutionary redundancy in the Tree of Life. This result is based on a particular set of branch lengths produced by the common coalescent, where…
Phylogenetic networks play an important role in evolutionary biology as, other than phylogenetic trees, they can be used to accommodate reticulate evolutionary events such as horizontal gene transfer and hybridization. Recent research has…
The study of species organization and their clustering by genetic or phenotypic similarity is carried out with the tools of phylogenetic trees. An important structural property of phylogenetic trees is the balance, which measures how taxa…
In recent years, there has been an effort to extend the classical notion of phylogenetic balance, originally defined in the context of trees, to networks. One of the most natural ways to do this is with the so-called $B_2$ index. In this…
We compute an explicit formula for the expected value of the Colless index of a phylogenetic tree generated under the Yule model, and an explicit formula for the expected value of the Sackin index of a phylogenetic tree generated under the…
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 cophenetic metrics $d_{\varphi,p}$, for $p\in {0}\cup[1,\infty[$, are a recent addition to the kit of available distances for the comparison of phylogenetic trees. Based on a fifty years old idea of Sokal and Rohlf, these metrics…
Tree balance plays an important role in different research areas like theoretical computer science and mathematical phylogenetics. For example, it has long been known that under the Yule model, a pure birth process, imbalanced trees are…
The Yule (pure-birth) model is the simplest null model of speciation; each lineage gives rise to a new lineage independently with the same rate $\lambda$. We investigate the expected length of an edge chosen at random from the resulting…
Neutral macroevolutionary models, such as the Yule model, give rise to a probability distribution on the set of discrete rooted binary trees over a given leaf set. Such models can provide a signal as to the approximate location of the root…
In a phylogenetic tree, we often don't have information about the time a speciation event (inner node) occured. Under a neutral model for speciation, I develop fast algorithms for calculating the probability that an inner node i is the k-th…
Measures of tree balance play an important role in various research areas, for example in phylogenetics. There they are for instance used to test whether an observed phylogenetic tree differs significantly from a tree generated by the Yule…
The reconstruction of large phylogenetic trees from data that violates clocklike evolution (or as a supertree constructed from any m input trees) raises a difficult question for biologists - how can one assign relative dates to the vertices…
We study maximal clades in random phylogenetic trees with the Yule-Harding model or, equivalently, in binary search trees. We use probabilistic methods to reprove and extend earlier results on moment asymptotics and asymptotic normality. In…