Abstract
By analogy with the theory surrounding the Ewens sampling formula in neutral population genetics, we ask whether there exists a natural one-parameter family of probability distributions on cladograms (“evolutionary trees”) which plays a central role in neutral evolutionary theory. Unfortunately the answer seems to be “no” - see Conjecture 2. But we can embed the two most popular models into an interesting family which we call “beta-splitting” models. We briefly describe some mathematical results about this family, which exhibits qualitatively different behavior for different ranges of the parameter β.
Research supported by N.S.F. Grant DMS92-24857.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Aldous, D. (1996). Probability Distributions on Cladograms. In: Aldous, D., Pemantle, R. (eds) Random Discrete Structures. The IMA Volumes in Mathematics and its Applications, vol 76. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0719-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0719-1_1
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