11 papers
Computing the Distribution of a Tree Metric
David Bryant, Mike Steel
The Robinson-Foulds (RF) distance is by far the most widely used measure of dissimilarity between trees. Although the distribution of these distances has been investigated for twen…
A basic limitation on inferring phylogenies by pairwise sequence comparisons
Mike Steel
Distance-based approaches in phylogenetics such as Neighbor-Joining are a fast and popular approach for building trees. These methods take pairs of sequences from them construct a…
Sequence length bounds for resolving a deep phylogenetic divergence
Mareike Fischer, Mike Steel
In evolutionary biology, genetic sequences carry with them a trace of the underlying tree that describes their evolution from a common ancestral sequence. The question of how many…
Markovian log-supermodularity, and its applications in phylogenetics
Mike Steel, Beata Faller
We establish a log-supermodularity property for probability distributions on binary patterns observed at the tips of a tree that are generated under any 2--state Markov process. We…
More Taxa Are Not Necessarily Better for the Reconstruction of Ancestral Character States
G. L. Li, M. Steel, L. X. Zhang
We show that the accuracy of reconstrucing an ancestral state is not an increasing function of the size of taxon sampling.
Maximum Likelihood Supertrees
Mike Steel, Allen Rodrigo
We analyse a maximum-likelihood approach for combining phylogenetic trees into a larger `supertree'. This is based on a simple exponential model of phylogenetic error, which ensure…