- Series
- Mathematical Biology Seminar
- Time
- Friday, October 28, 2022 - 3:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- ONLINE
- Speaker
- Jonathan Terhorst – University of Michigan - Department of Statistics – https://lsa.umich.edu/stats/people/faculty/JonathanTerhorst.html
- Organizer
- Brandon Legried
The phylogenetic birth-death process is a probabilistic model of evolution that
is widely used to analyze genetic data. In a striking result, Louca & Pennell
(Nature, 2020) recently showed that this model is statistically unidentifiable,
meaning that an arbitrary number of different evolutionary hypotheses are
consistent with any given data set. This grave finding has called into question
the conclusions of a large number of evolutionary studies which relied on this
model.
In this talk, I will give an introduction to the phylogenetic birth-death
process, and explain Louca and Pennell's unidentifiability result. Then, I will
describe recent positive results that we have obtained, which establish that, by
restricting the evolutionary hypothesis space in certain biologically plausible
ways, statistical identifiability is restored. Finally, I will discuss some
complementary hardness-of-estimation results which show that, even in identifiable
model classes, obtaining reliable inferences from finite amounts of data may be
extremely challenging.
No background in this area is assumed, and the talk will be accessible to a
mathematically mature audience. This is joint work with Brandon Legried.
Zoom link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/99936668317