12 December 2018 at 16:00

Organised in collaboration with the School of Mathematics, University of Bristol, UK

From Phylogenetics to Algebraic Geometry

Marta Casanellas, The Technical University of Catalonia, BarcelonaTech, Spain

Many of the evolutionary models used in phylogenetics can be viewed as algebraic varieties. In this expository talk we will explain the main goals of phylogenetics, introduce evolutionary Markov models on trees, and show how algebraic varieties arise in this context. Moreover, we will see how an in-depth geometric study of these varieties leads to improvements on phylogenetic reconstruction methods. We shall illustrate these improvements by showing results on simulated and real data and by comparing them to widely used methods in phylogenetics.

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