Related papers: Impossibility results on stability of phylogenetic…

Mutation rate variation across loci is well known to cause difficulties, notably identifiability issues, in the reconstruction of evolutionary trees from molecular sequences. Here we introduce a new approach for estimating general…

The dynamics of an agreement protocol interacting with a disagreement process over a common random network is considered. The model can represent the spreading of true and false information over a communication network, the propagation 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 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…

Compatibility of phylogenetic trees is the most important concept underlying widely-used methods for assessing the agreement of different phylogenetic trees with overlapping taxa and combining them into common supertrees to reveal the tree…

Several computational problems in phylogenetic reconstruction can be formulated as restrictions of the following general problem: given a formula in conjunctive normal form where the literals are rooted triples, is there a rooted binary…

The famous Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof shows that it is impossible to solve the consensus problem in a natural model of an asynchronous distributed system if even a single process can fail. Since its publication, two…

Community detection methods attempt to divide a network into groups of nodes that share similar properties, thus revealing its large-scale structure. A major challenge when employing such methods is that they are often degenerate, typically…

Modern distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to build a fault-tolerant-core upon which they can build applications. Consensus protocols are correct under a specific failure model, where up to $f$ machines can fail. We argue that…

With advances in sequencing technologies, there are now massive amounts of genomic data from across all life, leading to the possibility that a robust Tree of Life can be constructed. However, "gene tree heterogeneity", which is when…

In this paper we study asymptotic properties of random forests within the framework of nonlinear time series modeling. While random forests have been successfully applied in various fields, the theoretical justification has not been…

Modern science increasingly relies on ever-growing observational datasets and automated inference pipelines, under the implicit belief that accumulating more data makes scientific conclusions more reliable. Here we show that this belief can…

In this technical note, cluster consensus of discrete-time linear multi-agent systems is investigated. A set of stochastic matrices $\mathcal{P}$ is said to be a cluster consensus set if the system achieves cluster consensus for any initial…

We synthesize and unify notions of regularity, both of individual sets and of collections of sets, as they appear in the convergence theory of projection methods for consistent feasibility problems. Several new characterizations of…

This paper considers a resilient high-dimensional constrained consensus problem and studies a resilient distributed algorithm for complete graphs. For convex constrained sets with a singleton intersection, a sufficient condition on…

Mixture model-based frameworks are very popular for statistical inference in clustering. While convenient for producing probabilistic estimates of cluster assignments and uncertainty, they are prone to misspecification, which can lead to…

Phylogenetic inference can potentially result in a more accurate tree using data from multiple loci. However, if the loci are incongruent--due to events such as incomplete lineage sorting or horizontal gene transfer--it can be misleading to…

Statistical consistency in phylogenetics has traditionally referred to the accuracy of estimating phylogenetic parameters for a fixed number of species as we increase the number of characters. However, as sequences are often of fixed length…

A phylogenetic tree shows the evolutionary relationships among species. Internal nodes of the tree represent speciation events and leaf nodes correspond to species. A goal of phylogenetics is to combine such trees into larger trees, called…

In scientific inference problems, the underlying statistical modeling assumptions have a crucial impact on the end results. There exist, however, only a few automatic means for validating these fundamental modelling assumptions. The…