Related papers: Combinatorial views on persistent characters in ph…
Algorithms to find optimal alignments among strings, or to find a parsimonious summary of a collection of strings, are well studied in a variety of contexts, addressing a wide range of interesting applications. In this paper, we consider…
Reticulate evolution can be modelled using phylogenetic networks. Tree-based networks, which are one of the more general classes of phylogenetic networks, have recently gained eminence for its ability to represent evolutionary histories…
We study finite automata running over infinite binary trees. A run of such an automaton is usually said to be accepting if all its branches are accepting. In this article, we relax the notion of accepting run by allowing a certain quantity…
Suppose we have a set $X$ consisting of $n$ taxa and we are given information from $k$ loci from which to construct a phylogeny for $X$. Each locus offers information for only a fraction of the taxa. The question is whether this data…
Phylogenetic networks are a generalization of phylogenetic trees that are used in biology to represent reticulate or non-treelike evolution. Recently, several algorithms have been developed which aim to construct phylogenetic networks from…
Phylogenetic diversity is a measure for describing how much of an evolutionary tree is spanned by a subset of species. If one applies this to the (unknown) subset of current species that will still be present at some future time, then this…
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)…
Understanding the evolution of binary traits, which affects the birth and survival of species and also the rate of molecular evolution, remains challenging. A typical example is the evolution of mating systems in plant species. In this…
Predicting horizontal gene transfers often requires comparative sequence data, but recent work has shown that character-based approaches could also be useful for this task. Notably, perfect transfer networks (PTN) explain the character…
Phylogenetic networks generalize phylogenetic trees by representing reticulate evolution. Tree-based networks and their support trees have been extensively studied, but not all networks are tree-based. To measure how far such networks are…
In [2], while studying a relevant class of polyominoes that tile the plane by translation, i.e., double square polyominoes, the authors found that their boundary words, encoded by the Freeman chain coding on a four letters alphabet, have…
Null models of binary phylogenetic trees are useful for testing hypotheses on real world phylogenies. In this paper we consider phylogenies as binary trees without edge lengths together with a sampling measure and encode them as algebraic…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
Phylogenetic trees elucidate evolutionary relationships among species, but phylogenetic inference remains challenging due to the complexity of combining continuous (branch lengths) and discrete parameters (tree topology). Traditional Markov…
We determine upper and lower bounds for the number of maximum matchings (i.e., matchings of maximum cardinality) $m(T)$ of a tree $T$ of given order. While the trees that attain the lower bound are easily characterised, the trees with…
Ancestral sequence reconstruction is a key task in computational biology. It consists in inferring a molecular sequence at an ancestral species of a known phylogeny, given descendant sequences at the tip of the tree. In addition to its many…
Planning for the protection of species often involves difficult choices about which species to prioritize, given constrained resources. One way of prioritizing species is to consider their "evolutionary distinctiveness", i.e. their relative…
The reliability of a phylogenetic inference method from genomic sequence data is ensured by its statistical consistency. Bayesian inference methods produce a sample of phylogenetic trees from the posterior distribution given sequence data.…
Phylogenetic tree shapes capture fundamental signatures of evolution. We consider ``ranked'' tree shapes, which are equipped with a total order on the internal nodes compatible with the tree graph. Recent work has established an elegant…
A function on an algebra is congruence preserving if, for any congruence, it maps pairs of congruent elements onto pairs of congruent elements. We show that on the algebra of complete binary trees whose leaves are labeled by letters of an…