2,833 research outputs found
Unique perfect phylogeny is NP-hard
We answer, in the affirmative, the following question proposed by Mike Steel
as a $100 challenge: "Is the following problem NP-hard? Given a ternary
phylogenetic X-tree T and a collection Q of quartet subtrees on X, is T the
only tree that displays Q ?
Potential Maximal Clique Algorithms for Perfect Phylogeny Problems
Kloks, Kratsch, and Spinrad showed how treewidth and minimum-fill, NP-hard
combinatorial optimization problems related to minimal triangulations, are
broken into subproblems by block subgraphs defined by minimal separators. These
ideas were expanded on by Bouchitt\'e and Todinca, who used potential maximal
cliques to solve these problems using a dynamic programming approach in time
polynomial in the number of minimal separators of a graph. It is known that
solutions to the perfect phylogeny problem, maximum compatibility problem, and
unique perfect phylogeny problem are characterized by minimal triangulations of
the partition intersection graph. In this paper, we show that techniques
similar to those proposed by Bouchitt\'e and Todinca can be used to solve the
perfect phylogeny problem with missing data, the two- state maximum
compatibility problem with missing data, and the unique perfect phylogeny
problem with missing data in time polynomial in the number of minimal
separators of the partition intersection graph
Constructing computer virus phylogenies
There has been much recent algorithmic work on the problem of reconstructing the evolutionary history of biological species. Computer virus specialists are interested in finding the evolutionary history of computer viruses - a virus is often written using code fragments from one or more other viruses, which are its immediate ancestors. A phylogeny for a collection of computer viruses is a directed acyclic graph whose nodes are the viruses and whose edges map ancestors to descendants and satisfy the property that each code fragment is "invented" only once. To provide a simple explanation for the data, we consider the problem of constructing such a phylogeny with a minimum number of edges. In general this optimization problem is NP-complete; some associated approximation problems are also hard, but others are easy. When tree solutions exist, they can be constructed and randomly sampled in polynomial time
A New Quartet Tree Heuristic for Hierarchical Clustering
We consider the problem of constructing an an optimal-weight tree from the
3*(n choose 4) weighted quartet topologies on n objects, where optimality means
that the summed weight of the embedded quartet topologiesis optimal (so it can
be the case that the optimal tree embeds all quartets as non-optimal
topologies). We present a heuristic for reconstructing the optimal-weight tree,
and a canonical manner to derive the quartet-topology weights from a given
distance matrix. The method repeatedly transforms a bifurcating tree, with all
objects involved as leaves, achieving a monotonic approximation to the exact
single globally optimal tree. This contrasts to other heuristic search methods
from biological phylogeny, like DNAML or quartet puzzling, which, repeatedly,
incrementally construct a solution from a random order of objects, and
subsequently add agreement values.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figure
Recommended from our members
Inference of single-cell phylogenies from lineage tracing data using Cassiopeia.
The pairing of CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing with massively parallel single-cell readouts now enables large-scale lineage tracing. However, the rapid growth in complexity of data from these assays has outpaced our ability to accurately infer phylogenetic relationships. First, we introduce Cassiopeia-a suite of scalable maximum parsimony approaches for tree reconstruction. Second, we provide a simulation framework for evaluating algorithms and exploring lineage tracer design principles. Finally, we generate the most complex experimental lineage tracing dataset to date, 34,557 human cells continuously traced over 15 generations, and use it for benchmarking phylogenetic inference approaches. We show that Cassiopeia outperforms traditional methods by several metrics and under a wide variety of parameter regimes, and provide insight into the principles for the design of improved Cas9-enabled recorders. Together, these should broadly enable large-scale mammalian lineage tracing efforts. Cassiopeia and its benchmarking resources are publicly available at www.github.com/YosefLab/Cassiopeia
Tracing evolutionary links between species
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back
at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists
have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can
observe today: fossils, and the evolutionary signal that is present in the
genomes and phenotypes of different organisms. Mathematics has played a key
role in helping transform genetic data into phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees
and networks. Here, I will explain some of the central concepts and basic
results in phylogenetics, which benefit from several branches of mathematics,
including combinatorics, probability and algebra.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures (Invited review paper (draft version) for AMM
Clustering by compression
We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method
doesn't use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as
follows: First, we determine a universal similarity distance, the normalized
compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files
(singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical
clustering method. The NCD is universal in that it is not restricted to a
specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A
theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one
of the authors, is provably optimal but uses the non-computable notion of
Kolmogorov complexity. We propose precise notions of similarity metric, normal
compressor, and show that the NCD based on a normal compressor is a similarity
metric that approximates universality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from
the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (binary tree) by a new quartet
method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and
available as public software, and is robust under choice of different
compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we
report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics,
virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and
combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical,
dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics we presented new
evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on
whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta
hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis.Comment: LaTeX, 27 pages, 20 figure
- …