Related papers: The mean, variance and limiting distribution of tw…
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…
We compute an explicit formula for the expected value of the Colless index of a phylogenetic tree generated under the Yule model, and an explicit formula for the expected value of the Sackin index of a phylogenetic tree generated under the…
The Sackin and Colless indices are two widely-used metrics for measuring the balance of trees and for testing evolutionary models in phylogenetics. This short paper contributes two results about the Sackin and Colless indices of trees. One…
Measures of tree balance play an important role in various research areas, for example in phylogenetics. There they are for instance used to test whether an observed phylogenetic tree differs significantly from a tree generated by the Yule…
Measures of tree balance play an important role in the analysis of phylogenetic trees. One of the oldest and most popular indices in this regard is the Colless index for rooted bifurcating trees, introduced by Colless (1982). While many of…
Several indices that measure the degree of balance of a rooted phylogenetic tree have been proposed so far in the literature. In this work we define and study a new index of this kind, which we call the total cophenetic index: the sum, over…
Tree balance plays an important role in different research areas like theoretical computer science and mathematical phylogenetics. For example, it has long been known that under the Yule model, a pure birth process, imbalanced trees are…
The study of species organization and their clustering by genetic or phenotypic similarity is carried out with the tools of phylogenetic trees. An important structural property of phylogenetic trees is the balance, which measures how taxa…
The Colless index for bifurcating phylogenetic trees, introduced by Colless (1982), is defined as the sum, over all internal nodes $v$ of the tree, of the absolute value of the difference of the sizes of the clades defined by the children…
The Sackin index is an important measure for the balance of phylogenetic trees. We investigate two extensions of the Sackin index to the class of galled trees and two of its subclasses (simplex galled trees and normal galled trees) where we…
The Colless index is one of the most popular and natural balance indices for bifurcating phylogenetic trees, but it makes no sense for multifurcating trees. In this paper we propose a family of Colless-like balance indices…
In this work we study the limit distribution of an appropriately normalized cophenetic index of the pure-birth tree conditioned on $n$ contemporary tips. We show that this normalized phylogenetic balance index is a submartingale that…
Measures of phylogenetic balance, such as the Colless and Sackin indices, play an important role in phylogenetics. Unfortunately, these indices are specifically designed for phylogenetic trees, and do not extend naturally to phylogenetic…
The branching structure of biological evolution confers statistical dependencies on phenotypic trait values in related organisms. For this reason, comparative macroevolutionary studies usually begin with an inferred phylogeny that describes…
Efforts to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and understand evolutionary processes depend fundamentally on stochastic models of speciation and mutation. The simplest continuous-time model for speciation in phylogenetic trees is the Yule…
In recent years, there has been an effort to extend the classical notion of phylogenetic balance, originally defined in the context of trees, to networks. One of the most natural ways to do this is with the so-called $B_2$ index. In this…
Neutral macroevolutionary models, such as the Yule model, give rise to a probability distribution on the set of discrete rooted binary trees over a given leaf set. Such models can provide a signal as to the approximate location of the root…
A Yule tree is the result of a branching process with constant birth and death rates. Such a process serves as an instructive null model of many empirical systems, for instance, the evolution of species leading to a phylogenetic tree.…
We study two fringe subtree counting statistics, the number of cherries and that of pitchforks for Ford's $\alpha$ model, a one-parameter family of random phylogenetic tree models that includes the uniform and the Yule models, two tree…
(Im)balance indices can be used to quantify the (im)balance of trees by assigning numerical scores to them. An easy way to generate a new index is to construct a compound index, e.g., a linear combination of established indices. Two of the…