Related papers: Stochastic Models for Speciation Events in Phyloge…
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…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
We consider the task of learning Ising models when the signs of different random variables are flipped independently with possibly unequal, unknown probabilities. In this paper, we focus on the problem of robust estimation of…
Coalescent histories are combinatorial structures that describe for a given gene tree and species tree the possible lists of branches of the species tree on which the gene tree coalescences take place. Properties of the number of coalescent…
The Persistent-Phylogeny Model is an extension of the widely studied Perfect-Phylogeny Model, encompassing a broader range of evolutionary phenomena. Biological and algorithmic questions concerning persistent phylogeny have been intensely…
Stochastic modeling of phylogenies raises five questions that have received varying levels of attention from quantitatively inclined biologists. 1) How large do we expect (from the model) the ration of maximum historical diversity to…
Given a gene-tree labeled topology $G$ and a species tree $S$, the "ancestral configurations" at an internal node $k$ of $S$ represent the combinatorially different sets of gene lineages that can be present at $k$ when all possible…
A learning algorithm is presented which given the structure of a causal tree, will estimate its link probabilities by sequential measurements on the leaves only. Internal nodes of the tree represent conceptual (hidden) variables…
Identifying undocumented or potential future interactions among species is a challenge facing modern ecologists. Recent link prediction methods rely on trait data, however large species interaction databases are typically sparse and…
Preferential attachment is a popular generative mechanism to explain the widespread observation of power law distributed networks. We introduce an alternative explanation for the phenomenon by allowing the link growth rates to vary across…
A model of genomic sequence evolution on a species tree should include not only a sequence substitution process, but also a coalescent process, since different sites may evolve on different gene trees due to incomplete lineage sorting.…
Forward-time models of diversification (i.e., speciation and extinction) produce phylogenetic trees that grow "vertically" as time goes by. Pruning the extinct lineages out of such trees leads to natural models for reconstructed trees…
Null models of binary phylogenetic trees are useful for testing hypotheses on real world phylogenies. In this paper we consider phylogenies as binary trees without edge lengths together with a sampling measure and encode them as algebraic…
For a family of models of evolving population under selection, which can be described by noisy traveling wave equations, the coalescence times along the genealogical tree scale like $\log^\alpha N$, where $N$ is the size of the population,…
Phylogenetic networks provide a means of describing the evolutionary history of sets of species believed to have undergone hybridization or gene flow during their evolution. The mutation process for a set of such species can be modeled as a…
Fixed tree topologies are widely used in phylodynamic analyses to reduce computational burden, yet the consequences of this assumption remain insufficiently understood. Here, we systematically assess the impact of various fixed-topology…
Diversification models describe the random growth of evolutionary trees, modeling the historical relationships of species through speciation and extinction events. One class of such models allows for independently changing traits, or types,…
In phylogenetics, tree-based networks are used to model and visualize the evolutionary history of species where reticulate events such as horizontal gene transfer have occurred. Formally, a tree-based network $N$ consists of a phylogenetic…
Species tree reconstruction is complicated by effects of Incomplete Lineage Sorting (ILS), commonly modeled by the multi-species coalescent model. While there has been substantial progress in developing methods that estimate a species tree…
The use of fossil evidence to calibrate divergence time estimation has a long history. More recently Bayesian MCMC has become the dominant method of divergence time estimation and fossil evidence has been re-interpreted as the specification…