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Department of Statistics, The Ohio State University
Statistics and Biostatistics Colloquium Series
Jointly Sponsored by Department of Evolution, Ecology,
and Organismal Biology
Promises and Pitfalls of MCMC for Evolutionary Trees
Mary Kuhner
Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle
3:30PM - Thursday, October 25, 2007
Room 170, Eighteenth Avenue Bldg. (EA 170)
ABSTRACT
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which search the space of
evolutionary trees have become suddenly important in evolution and
population biology. They are used both to infer phylogenies (MrBayes)
and to estimate population-genetics parameters (LAMARC, BEAST, IM, etc).
In this talk I will describe evolutionary-tree MCMC approaches and talk
about their strengths and weaknesses, including several unsolved problems.
How can we know whether the search is succeeding? How can we keep it
from becoming stuck, especially in cases where we are varying strongly
correlated aspects of our model?
Meet the speaker in Room 212 Cockins Hall at 4:30
p.m. Refreshments will be served.
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