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Maximum likelihood in phylogenetics: Relating combinatorial and variational distances on trees
ProbabilitySpeaker: | Sebastien Roch, University of Wisconsin |
Location: | 3106 MSB |
Start time: | Wed, Apr 16 2014, 4:10PM |
I will describe recent results on a deep connection between a well-studied phase transition in Markov random fields on trees and two important problems in evolutionary biology: the inference of ancestral molecular sequences and the estimation of large phylogenies using maximum likelihood. No biology background will be assumed. This is joint work with A. Sly.