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Maximum likelihood in phylogenetics: Relating combinatorial and variational distances on trees
Probability| Speaker: | Sebastien Roch, University of Wisconsin |
| Location: | 3106 MSB |
| Start time: | Wed, Apr 16 2014, 4:10PM |
Description
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.