The Statistics Seminar speaker for Wednesday, October 10, 2018 is Arindam RoyChoudhury. He has primary research interest in statistical methods in phylogenomics and biomedical sciences. He graduated with a PhD from University of Washington (2002-2006), and was postdoctoral researcher at Harvard and Cornell Universities (2006-2009). He was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University (2009-2017), and has been an Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine of Cornell University (2017-). He has received statistics grants as PI from NSF and NSA, and was awarded Calderone Junior Faculty Prize.
Title: Likelihood Estimation of Large Species Trees Using the Coalescent Process
Abstract: A species tree is a weighted tree-graph that represents the order and the magnitude of separation between a given set of species. Statistical estimation of trees is an integral part of studying species trees. Although various likelihood and Bayesian estimators of species trees are available, none of these methods are fast enough to estimate very large species trees under a certain commonly used model (the coalescent). This problem is especially relevant today because there has been a recent influx of large amount of genomic data. Here I will present an approach of fast likelihood estimation of species trees, exploiting a certain special structure of the tree space. Using this approach, one will be able to estimate larger species trees than previously possible in a reasonable time.