When relating a set of sequences by a phylogeny, we are essentially constructing a Steiner tree connecting the sequences in the space of all finite sequences. Finding an optimal Steiner tree is in most formulations hard, so population genetics and phylogenetics have often used spanning trees as an approximation for computational expediency. In this assessment you will be asked to investigate an...

A fundamental problem in biological classification is the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees for a set X of species from a collection of either subtrees or qualitative characters. This task is equivalent to tree reconstruction from a set of partial X–splits (bipartitions of subsets of X). In this paper, we define and analyse a “closure” operation for partial X–splits that was informally propo...

Identifiability of evolutionary tree models has been a recent topic of discussion and some models have been shown to be non-identifiable. A coalescent-based rooted population tree model, originally proposed by Nielsen et al. 1998 [2], has been used by many authors in the last few years and is a simple tool to accurately model the changes in allele frequencies in the tree. However, the identifia...