Related papers: Optimal Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Sampled Q…
The tree reconstruction problem is to collect and analyze massive data at the $n$th level of the tree, to identify whether there is non-vanishing information of the root, as $n$ goes to infinity. Its connection to the clustering problem in…
The ancestral maximum-likelihood and phylogeography problems are two fundamental problems involving evolutionary studies. The ancestral maximum-likelihood problem involves identifying a rooted tree alongside internal node sequences that…
We propose and study a multi-scale approach to vector quantization. We develop an algorithm, dubbed reconstruction trees, inspired by decision trees. Here the objective is parsimonious reconstruction of unsupervised data, rather than…
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…
In phylogenetic networks, it is desirable to estimate edge lengths in substitutions per site or calendar time. Yet, there is a lack of scalable methods that provide such estimates. Here we consider the problem of obtaining edge length…
This paper is concerned with the approximation of high-dimensional functions in a statistical learning setting, by empirical risk minimization over model classes of functions in tree-based tensor format. These are particular classes of…
In the longest plane spanning tree problem, we are given a finite planar point set $\mathcal{P}$, and our task is to find a plane (i.e., noncrossing) spanning tree for $\mathcal{P}$ with maximum total Euclidean edge length. Despite more…
The population recovery problem asks one to recover an unknown distribution over $n$-bit strings given access to independent noisy samples of strings drawn from the distribution. Recently, Ban et al. [BCF+19] studied the problem where the…
The number of the non-shared edges of two phylogenies is a basic measure of the dissimilarity between the phylogenies. The non-shared edges are also the building block for approximating a more sophisticated metric called the nearest…
Mutations of genetic sequences are often accompanied by their recombinations, known as phylogenetic networks. These networks are typically reconstructed from coalescent processes that may arise from optimal merging or fitting together a…
Reconstructing evolutionary trees from molecular sequence data is a fundamental problem in computational biology. Stochastic models of sequence evolution are closely related to spin systems that have been extensively studied in statistical…
We present four novel approximation algorithms for finding triangulation of minimum treewidth. Two of the algorithms improve on the running times of algorithms by Robertson and Seymour, and Becker and Geiger that approximate the optimum by…
Phylogenomics, even more so than traditional phylogenetics, needs to represent the uncertainty in evolutionary trees due to systematic error. Here we illustrate the analysis of genome-scale alignments of yeast, using robust measures of the…
Distance-based phylogenetic algorithms attempt to solve the NP-hard least squares phylogeny problem by mapping an arbitrary dissimilarity map representing biological data to a tree metric. The set of all dissimilarity maps is a Euclidean…
We present an efficient phylogenetic reconstruction algorithm allowing insertions and deletions which provably achieves a sequence-length requirement (or sample complexity) growing polynomially in the number of taxa. Our algorithm is…
We define a new problem in comparative genomics, denoted PQ-Tree Search, that takes as input a PQ-tree $T$ representing the known gene orders of a gene cluster of interest, a gene-to-gene substitution scoring function $h$, integer…
The rooted subtree prune and regraft (rSPR) distance between two rooted binary phylogenetic trees is a well-studied measure of topological dissimilarity that is NP-hard to compute. Here we describe an improved linear kernel for the problem.…
Tackling simulation optimization problems with non-convex objective functions remains a fundamental challenge in operations research. In this paper, we propose a class of random search algorithms, called Regular Tree Search, which…
We consider the following basic problem in phylogenetic tree construction. Let $\mathcal{P} = \{T_1, \ldots, T_k\}$ be a collection of rooted phylogenetic trees over various subsets of a set of species. The tree compatibility problem asks…
Phylogenetic networks are a type of leaf-labelled, acyclic, directed graph used by biologists to represent the evolutionary history of species whose past includes reticulation events. A phylogenetic network is tree-child if each non-leaf…