Related papers: The structure of deviations from maximum parsimony…
Predicting the ancestral sequences of a group of homologous sequences related by a phylogenetic tree has been the subject of many studies, and numerous methods have been proposed to this purpose. Theoretical results are available that show…
Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event…
Generative models derived from large protein sequence alignments define complex fitness landscapes, but their utility for accurately modeling non-equilibrium evolutionary dynamics remains unclear. In this work, we perform a rigorous…
In particle-in-cell simulations and some other statistical computations, the representation of modelled distributions with tracked macro-particles can become locally excessive. Merging or resampling dense clusters or highly-populated phase…
In the past several years a wide range of methods for the construction of regression trees and other estimators based on the recursive partitioning of samples have appeared in the statistics literature. Many applications involve data…
We observe $n$ sequences at each of $m$ sites, and assume that they have evolved from an ancestral sequence that forms the root of a binary tree of known topology and branch lengths, but the sequence states at internal nodes are unknown.…
Maximum likelihood is one of the most widely used techniques to infer evolutionary histories. Although it is thought to be intractable, a proof of its hardness has been lacking. Here, we give a short proof that computing the maximum…
The ability to estimate the evolutionary distance between extant genomes plays a crucial role in many phylogenomic studies. Often such estimation is based on the parsimony assumption, implying that the distance between two genomes can be…
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…
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…
In phylogenomics, species-tree methods must contend with two major sources of noise; stochastic gene-tree variation under the multispecies coalescent model (MSC) and finite-sequence substitutional noise. Fast agglomerative methods such as…
Estimating the effective sample size (ESS) is fundamental in Bayesian phylogenetic inference to properly account for autocorrelation in MCMC samples. While methods for continuous parameters are well established, the discrete and…
Accurate estimation of evolutionary distances between taxa is important for many phylogenetic reconstruction methods. In the case of bacteria, distances can be estimated using a range of different evolutionary models, from single nucleotide…
A method for creating a forest of model trees to fit samples of a function defined on images is described in several steps: down-sampling the images, determining a tree's hyperplanes, applying convolutions to the hyperplanes to handle small…
Quartet Reconstruction, the task of recovering a phylogenetic tree from smaller trees on four species called \textit{quartets}, is a well-studied problem in theoretical computer science with far-reaching connections to statistics, graph…
We consider supervised learning with random decision trees, where the tree construction is completely random. The method is popularly used and works well in practice despite the simplicity of the setting, but its statistical mechanism is…
In this article the results of Waddell and Azad (2009) are extended. In particular, the geometric percentage mean standard deviation measure of the fit of distances to a phylogenetic tree is adjusted for the number of parameters fitted to…
We investigated testing the likelihood of a phylogenetic tree by comparison to its subtree pruning and regrafting (SPR) neighbors, with or without re-optimizing branch lengths. This is inspired by aspects of Bayesian significance tests, and…
Sparse decision trees are one of the most common forms of interpretable models. While recent advances have produced algorithms that fully optimize sparse decision trees for prediction, that work does not address policy design, because the…
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…