"The Balanced Minimum Evolution Polytope for Phylogenetics"

Peter Huggins
Berkeley

Monday, November 5, 2007
4:00 pm, 113 Patterson Office Tower

Abstract:

Recovering tree metrics from perturbed pairwise distances is a continually evolving topic in computational biology. On the mathematical front, several recent results have eludicated the Balanced Minimum Evolution (BME) method for building phylogenetic trees. In a show-stopper paper, Gascuel and Steel have finally unified BME with the classical neighbor joining algorithm, under an umbrella of algorithms that all attempt to solve a particular linear program over trees. In this talk I'll discuss the feasible region for this linear program, which we call the BME polytope. After touring the relevant background, I'll present recent results and important questions about the combinatorics of this BME polytope.