Statistics for phylogenetic trees.
This paper poses the problem of estimating and validating phylogenetic trees in statistical terms. The problem is hard enough to warrant several tacks: we reason by analogy to rounding real numbers, and dealing with ranking data. These are both cases where, as in phylogeny the parameters of interest are not real numbers. Then we pose the problem in geometrical terms, using distances and measures on a natural space of trees. We do not solve the problems of inference on tree space, but suggest some coherent ways of tackling them.
Holmes
Susan
S
Statistics Department, Stanford University, CA 94305-4065, USA. susan@stat.stanford.edu
D000818:Animals; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D010802:Phylogeny; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*