Related papers: Bridging trees for posterior inference on Ancestra…
We develop a new Markov chain on graph partitions that makes relatively global moves yet is computationally feasible to be used as the proposal in the Metropolis-Hastings method. Our resulting algorithm can be made reversible and able to…
We introduce an algorithm for generating a random sequence of fragmentation trees, which we call the ancestral branching algorithm. This algorithm builds on the recursive partitioning structure of a tree and gives rise to an associated…
A method was developed for Bayesian inference of species phylogeny using the multi-species coalescent model. To improve the mixing properties of the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm that traverses the space of species trees, we…
The complex correlation structure of a collection of orthologous DNA sequences is uniquely captured by the "ancestral recombination graph" (ARG), a complete record of coalescence and recombination events in the history of the sample.…
Recent work has proven the existence of extreme inbreeding in a European ancestry sample taken from the contemporary UK population \cite{nature_01}. This result brings our attention again to a math problem related to inbreeding family trees…
Tree graphs are routinely used in statistics. When estimating a Bayesian model with a tree component, sampling the posterior remains a core difficulty. Existing Markov chain Monte Carlo methods tend to rely on local moves, often leading to…
The high-throughput short-reads RNA-seq protocols often produce paired-end reads, with the middle portion of the fragments being unsequenced. We explore if the full-length fragments can be computationally reconstructed from the sequenced…
Novel Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have enabled the generation of large ensembles of redistricting plans through graph partitioning. However, existing algorithms such as Reversible Recombination (RevReCom) and Metropolized Forest…
We present a general framework for defining priors on model structure and sampling from the posterior using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. The key idea is that structure priors are defined via a probability tree and that the proposal…
Phylogenetic inference is an intractable statistical problem on a complex space. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are the primary tool for Bayesian phylogenetic inference but it is challenging to construct efficient schemes to explore the…
We develop a Multi-Scale Merge-Split Markov chain on redistricting plans. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a graph into a…
In Bayesian phylogenetics, our goal is to estimate the posterior distribution over phylogenetic trees. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are widely used to approximate the phylogenetic posterior distributions. For large-scale sequence data,…
Recent advances in stochastic gradient variational inference have made it possible to perform variational Bayesian inference with posterior approximations containing auxiliary random variables. This enables us to explore a new synthesis of…
Pedigrees are directed acyclic graphs that represent ancestral relationships between individuals in a population. Based on a schematic recombination process, we describe two simple Markov models for sequences evolving on pedigrees - Model R…
Specifying a full Bayesian model that integrates multiple data sources can be challenging. One natural approach is to specify each individual model separately and join them afterwards. This is the approach adopted in Markov melding.…
This paper introduces a series of methods for traversing binary decision trees using arithmetic operations. We present a suite of binary tree traversal algorithms that leverage novel representation matrices to flatten the full binary tree…
The spanning tree heuristic is a commonly adopted procedure in network inference and estimation. It allows one to generalize an inference method developed for trees, which is usually based on a statistically rigorous approach, to a…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
A one-to-one correspondence is established between the bridge path space of birth-death processes and the exclusive union of the product spaces of simplexes and integer grids. Formulae are derived for the exact counting of the integer grid…
Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods often suffer from long correlation times. Consequently, these methods must be run for many steps to generate an independent sample. In this paper a method is proposed to overcome this difficulty.…