Related papers: Stochastic Models for Speciation Events in Phyloge…
For many taxa, the current high rates of extinction are likely to result in a significant loss of biodiversity. The evolutionary heritage of biodiversity is frequently quantified by a measure called phylogenetic diversity (PD). We predict…
As researchers collect increasingly large molecular data sets to reconstruct the Tree of Life, the heterogeneity of signals in the genomes of diverse organisms poses challenges for traditional phylogenetic analysis. A class of phylogenetic…
We give a overview of stochastic models of evolution that have found applications in genetics, ecology and linguistics for an audience of nonspecialists, especially statistical physicists. In particular, we focus mostly on neutral models in…
Species tree estimation is a complex problem, due to the fact that different parts of the genome can have different evolutionary histories than the genome itself. One of the causes for this discord is incomplete lineage sorting (also called…
A phylogenetic birth-and-death model is a probabilistic graphical model for a so-called phylogenetic profile, i.e., the size distribution for a homolog gene family at the terminal nodes of a phylogeny. Profile datasets are used in…
We propose the following simple stochastic model for phylogenetic trees. New types are born and die according to a birth and death chain. At each birth we associate a fitness to the new type sampled from a fixed distribution. At each death…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…
Yule's 1925 paper introducing the branching model that bears his name was a landmark contribution to the biodiversity sciences. In his paper, Yule developed stochastic models to explain the observed distribution of species across genera and…
One of the main applications of balance indices is in tests of null models of evolutionary processes. The knowledge of an exact formula for a statistic of a balance index, holding for any number n of leaves, is necessary in order to use…
Gene gain-loss-duplication models are commonly based on continuous-time birth-death processes. Employed in a phylogenetic context, such models have been increasingly popular in studies of gene content evolution across multiple genomes.…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
In a recent paper on 'Estimating Species Trees from Unrooted Gene Trees' Liu and Yu observe that the distance matrix on the underlying taxon set, which is built up from expected internode distances on gene trees under the multispecies…
We present novel analytical results about ecosystem species diversity that stem from a proposed coarse grained neutral model based on birth-death processes. The relevance of the problem lies in the urgency for understanding and synthesizing…
Identifiability of evolutionary tree models has been a recent topic of discussion and some models have been shown to be non-identifiable. A coalescent-based rooted population tree model, originally proposed by Nielsen et al. 1998 [2], has…
We present a stochastic model for the size of a taxon in paleobiology, in which we allow for the evolution of new taxon members, and both individual and catastrophic extinction events. The model uses ideas from the theory of birth and death…
The reconstruction of a species phylogeny from genomic data faces two significant hurdles: 1) the trees describing the evolution of each individual gene--i.e., the gene trees--may differ from the species phylogeny and 2) the molecular…
An early burst of speciation followed by a subsequent slowdown in the rate of diversification is commonly inferred from molecular phylogenies. This pattern is consistent with some verbal theory of ecological opportunity and adaptive…
We consider a neutral dynamical model of biological diversity, where individuals live and reproduce independently. They have i.i.d. lifetime durations (which are not necessarily exponentially distributed) and give birth (singly) at constant…
For a model of molecular evolution to be useful for phylogenetic inference, the topology of evolutionary trees must be identifiable. That is, from a joint distribution the model predicts, it must be possible to recover the tree parameter.…
Motivation: The abundance of gene flow in the Tree of Life challenges the notion that evolution can be represented with a fully bifurcating process, as this process cannot capture important biological realities like hybridization,…