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We introduce a scale-free method for testing the proportionality of branch lengths between two phylogenetic trees that have the same topology and contain the same set of taxa. This method scales both trees to a total length of 1 and sums up…
Connected acyclic graphs (trees) are data objects that hierarchically organize categories. Collections of trees arise in a diverse variety of fields, including evolutionary biology, public health, machine learning, social sciences and…
Phylogenies are commonly used to represent the evolutionary relationships between species, and often these phylogenies are equipped with edge lengths that indicate degrees of evolutionary difference. Given such a phylogeny, a popular…
Consider a tree $T=(V,E)$ with root $\circ$ and edge length function $\ell:E\to\mathbb{R}_+$. The phylogenetic covariance matrix of $T$ is the matrix $C$ with rows and columns indexed by $L$, the leaf set of $T$, with entries…
Phylogenetic diversity indices provide a formal way to apportion 'evolutionary heritage' across species. Two natural diversity indices are Fair Proportion (FP) and Equal Splits (ES). FP is also called 'evolutionary distinctiveness' and, for…
The Robinson-Foulds (RF) metric is arguably the most widely used measure of phylogenetic tree similarity, despite its well-known shortcomings: For example, moving a single taxon in a tree can result in a tree that has maximum distance to…
Rooted bifurcating trees are mathematical objects used to model evolutionary relationships and arise naturally in both coalescent theory and phylogenetics. Recent numerical representations of tree topologies, known as F-matrices, allow for…
Semidirected networks have received interest in evolutionary biology as the appropriate generalization of unrooted trees to networks, in which some but not all edges are directed. Yet these networks lack proper theoretical study. We define…
We propose a statistical method to test whether two phylogenetic trees with given alignments are significantly incongruent. Our method compares the two distributions of phylogenetic trees given by the input alignments, instead of comparing…
Because biological processes can make different loci have different evolutionary histories, species tree estimation requires multiple loci from across the genome. While many processes can result in discord between gene trees and species…
Coalescent models of bifurcating genealogies are used to infer evolutionary parameters from molecular data. However, there are many situations where bifurcating genealogies do not accurately reflect the true underlying ancestral history of…
Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) is a common source of gene tree incongruence in multilocus analyses. A large number of methods have been developed to infer species trees in the presence of ILS. Here we provide a mathematical analysis of…
Phylogenetic networks generalise phylogenetic trees and allow for the accurate representation of the evolutionary history of a set of present-day species whose past includes reticulate events such as hybridisation and lateral gene transfer.…
The algebraic properties of flattenings and subflattenings provide direct methods for identifying edges in the true phylogeny -- and by extension the complete tree -- using pattern counts from a sequence alignment. The relatively small…
Staged trees are a recently-developed, powerful family of probabilistic graphical models. An equivalence class of staged trees has now been characterised, and two fundamental statistical operators have been defined to traverse the…
The problem of reconstructing evolutionary trees or phylogenies is of great interest in computational biology. A popular model for this problem assumes that we are given the set of leaves (current species) of an unknown binary tree and the…
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…
We compare the phylogenetic tensors for various trees and networks for two, three and four taxa. If the probability spaces between one tree or network and another are not identical then there will be phylogenetic tensors that could have…
A semiregular tree is a tree where all non-pendant vertices have the same degree. Belardo et al. (MATCH Commun. Math. Chem. 61(2), pp. 503-515, 2009) have shown that among all semiregular trees with a fixed order and degree, a graph with…
The alpha model, a parametrized family of probabilities on cladograms (rooted binary leaf labeled trees), is introduced. This model is Markovian self-similar, deletion-stable (sampling consistent), and passes through the Yule, Uniform and…