Related papers: Sufficient condition for root reconstruction by pa…
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…
A major task of evolutionary biology is the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from molecular data. The evolutionary model is given by a Markov chain on a tree. Given samples from the leaves of the Markov chain, the goal is to reconstruct…
The recursive and hierarchical structure of full rooted trees is applicable to represent statistical models in various areas, such as data compression, image processing, and machine learning. In most of these cases, the full rooted tree is…
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…
We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…
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 tree-metric theorem provides a necessary and sufficient condition for a dissimilarity matrix to be a tree metric, and has served as the foundation for numerous distance-based reconstruction methods in phylogenetics. Our main result is…
Recurrence formulas are presented for studying the accuracy of the Fitch method for reconstructing the ancestral states in a given phylogenetic tree. As their applications, we analyze the convergence of the accuracy of reconstructing the…
Consider a Markov chain on an infinite tree T=(V,E) rooted at \rho. In such a chain, once the initial root state \sigma(\rho) is chosen, each vertex iteratively chooses its state from the one of its parent by an application of a Markov…
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…
We consider a branching random walk with binary state space and index set $T^k$, the infinite rooted tree in which each node has k children (also known as the model of "broadcasting on a tree"). The root of the tree takes a random value 0…
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…
Phylogenetics uses alignments of molecular sequence data to learn about evolutionary trees. Substitutions in sequences are modelled through a continuous-time Markov process, characterised by an instantaneous rate matrix, which standard…
We study random trees which are invariant in law under the operation of contracting each edge independently with probability $p\in(0,1)$. We show that all such trees can be constructed through Poissonian sampling from a certain class of…
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…
Given an edge-weighted tree $T$ with $n$ leaves, sample the leaves uniformly at random without replacement and let $W_k$, $2 \le k \le n$, be the length of the subtree spanned by the first $k$ leaves. We consider the question, "Can $T$ be…
We use a classical combinatorial inequality to establish a Markov inequality for multivariate binary Markov processes on trees. We then apply this result, alongside with the FKG inequality, to compare the expected loss of biodiversity under…
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…
We consider a model of random tree growth, where at each time unit a new vertex is added and attached to an already existing vertex chosen at random. The probability with which a vertex with degree $k$ is chosen is proportional to $w(k)$,…
Reconstructing the ancestral state of a group of species helps answer many important questions in evolutionary biology. Therefore, it is crucial to understand when we can estimate the ancestral state accurately. Previous works provide a…