🧬Dr. Owen will present on the Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann phylogenetic space, applications to Evolutionary Biology, and visualization of phylogenetic landscapes.

💡Join us on Friday, May 2nd at 11:00 AM EDT HERE.

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Title: Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann (BHV) Phylogenetic Tree Space: Algorithms and Applications to Evolutionary Biology

Abstract: A continuous phylogenetic tree space is a geometric space whose points correspond to phylogenetic trees with branch lengths. Such a space provides a framework for analyzing both the tree topology and branch lengths together, which is important for processes such as the multi-species coalescent which depend on tree branch lengths. This talk will introduce the most well-known such space, the Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann (BHV) tree space. BHV tree space has several nice properties, including unique shortest paths (geodesics) between pairs of trees, and a unique tree (the Fréchet mean) minimizing the sum of the squared distances to a set of trees. I will discuss some recent work on algorithms and applications of BHV tree space, including using the geodesics to explore and visualize phylogenetic landscapes and to find relevant high likelihood trees.

PDF Event Flyer HERE.