Distance-based species tree estimation: information-theoretic trade-off between number of loci and sequence length under the coalescent

2015/04/21 by Mossel, Elchanan, Roch, Sebastien
#FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE) #Probability (math.PR) #Statistics Theory (math.ST)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1504.05289

Abstract

We consider the reconstruction of a phylogeny from multiple genes under the multispecies coalescent. We establish a connection with the sparse signal detection problem, where one seeks to distinguish between a distribution and a mixture of the distribution and a sparse signal. Using this connection, we derive an information-theoretic trade-off between the number of genes, m, needed for an accurate reconstruction and the sequence length, k, of the genes. Specifically, we show that to detect a branch of length f, one needs m = Θ(1/[f² √(k)]).

Related

• Coalescent-based species tree estimation: a stochastic Farris transform
• Covariance Decomposition for Distance Based Species Tree Estimation
• Note on expected internode distances for gene trees in species trees
• Species tree inference from genomic sequences using the log-det distance
• The effect of gene flow on coalescent-based species-tree inference