Sufficient condition for root reconstruction by parsimony on binary trees with general weights
Probability
2021-01-01 v2 Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Populations and Evolution
Abstract
We consider the problem of inferring an ancestral state from observations at the leaves of a tree, assuming the state evolves along the tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process. We establish a general branching rate condition under which maximum parsimony, a common reconstruction method requiring only the knowledge of the tree, succeeds better than random guessing uniformly in the depth of the tree. We thereby generalize previous results of (Zhang et al., 2010) and (Gascuel and Steel, 2010). Our results apply to both deterministic and i.i.d. edge weights.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.02524,
title = {Sufficient condition for root reconstruction by parsimony on binary trees with general weights},
author = {Sebastien Roch and Kun-Chieh Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.02524},
year = {2021}
}