Distance-based species tree estimation: information-theoretic trade-off between number of loci and sequence length under the coalescent

Abstract

We consider the reconstruction of a phylogeny from multiple genes under the multispecies coalescent. We establish a connection with the sparse signal detection problem, where one seeks to distinguish between a distribution and a mixture of the distribution and a sparse signal. Using this connection, we derive an information-theoretic trade-off between the number of genes, $m$, needed for an accurate reconstruction and the sequence length, $k$, of the genes. Specifically, we show that to detect a branch of length $f$, one needs $m=\Theta (1/[f^2\sqrt{k}])$.

To appear in The Annals of Applied Probability

References in corpus (2)

• A Survey on Latent Tree Models and Applications
• Data Requirement for Phylogenetic Inference from Multiple Loci: A New Distance Method