Related papers: A Short Proof that Phylogenetic Tree Reconstructio…
A probabilistic reconstruction of genealogies in a polyploid population (from 2x to 4x) is investigated, by considering genetic data analyzed as the probability of allele presence in a given genotype. Based on the likelihood of all possible…
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) methods are widely used for evolutionary tree. As evolutionary tree is not a smooth parameter, the consistency of its MLE has been a topic of debate. It has been noted without proof that the classical…
In this paper we investigate mathematical questions concerning the reliability (reconstruction accuracy) of Fitch's maximum parsimony algorithm for reconstructing the ancestral state given a phylogenetic tree and a character. In particular,…
We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…
We show that reconstructing a tree from order information on triples is NP-hard. This is in contrast to the case for ultra-metrics and for subtree information on quadruples which are both known to allow polynomial time reconstruction.
One of the main aims of phylogenetics is to reconstruct the \enquote{Tree of Life}. In this respect, different methods and criteria are used to analyze DNA sequences of different species and to compare them in order to derive the…
Phylogenetic inference, the task of reconstructing how related sequences evolved from common ancestors, is a central objective in evolutionary genomics. The current state-of-the-art methods exploit probabilistic models of sequence evolution…
A major task of evolutionary biology is the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from molecular data. The evolutionary model is given by a Markov chain on a tree. Given samples from the leaves of the Markov chain, the goal is to reconstruct…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
We answer, in the affirmative, the following question proposed by Mike Steel as a $100 challenge: "Is the following problem NP-hard? Given a ternary phylogenetic X-tree T and a collection Q of quartet subtrees on X, is T the only tree that…
One strategy for reconstruction of phylogenetic networks is to solve the phylogenetic network problem, which involves inferring phylogenetic trees first and subsequently computing the smallest phylogenetic network that displays all the…
The knowledge of the network topology is imperative to precisely describing the viral dynamics of an SIS epidemic process. In scenarios for which the network topology is unknown, one resorts to reconstructing the network from observing the…
Estimating phylogenetic trees, which depict the relationships between different species, from aligned sequence data (such as DNA, RNA, or proteins) is one of the main aims of evolutionary biology. However, tree reconstruction criteria like…
Phylogenetic networks are necessary to represent the tree of life expanded by edges to represent events such as horizontal gene transfers, hybridizations or gene flow. Not all species follow the paradigm of vertical inheritance of their…
Tree-based phylogenetic networks, which may be roughly defined as leaf-labeled networks built by adding arcs only between the original tree edges, have elegant properties for modeling evolutionary histories. We answer an open question of…
We discuss the computational complexity of approximating maximum a posteriori inference in sum-product networks. We first show NP-hardness in trees of height two by a reduction from maximum independent set; this implies non-approximability…
Within the field of phylogenetics there is great interest in distance measures to quantify the dissimilarity of two trees. Here, based on an idea of Bruen and Bryant, we propose and analyze a new distance measure: the Maximum Parsimony (MP)…
This paper studies a Markov chain for phylogenetic reconstruction which uses a popular transition between tree topologies known as subtree pruning-and-regrafting (SPR). We analyze the Markov chain in the simpler setting that the generating…
We present the first sub-quadratic time algorithm that with high probability correctly reconstructs phylogenetic trees for short sequences generated by a Markov model of evolution. Due to rapid expansion in sequence databases, such very…
Finding the most parsimonious tree inside a phylogenetic network with respect to a given character is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that for many network topologies is essentially inapproximable. In contrast, if the network…