Efficient Inference in Phylogenetic InDel Trees

Accurate and efficient inference in evolutionary trees is a central problem in computational biology. While classical treatments have made unrealistic site independence assumptions, ignoring insertions and deletions, realistic approaches require tracking insertions and deletions along the phylogenetic tree--a challenging and unsolved computational problem. We propose a new ancestry resampling procedure for inference in evolutionary trees. We evaluate our method in two problem domains--multiple sequence alignment and reconstruction of ancestral sequences--and show substantial improvement over the current state of the art.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Alexandre Bouchard-Côté, Michael I. Jordan, Dan Klein
• Keywords: Evolutionary Trees, Information Technology, NIPS 2008, Unrealistic Site Independence, Unsolved Computational Problem